"We need to find something that justifies Presidents crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower"
It is now clear that the scandal was not Rices normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rices unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.
I spoke to two intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who was briefed on their contents. Theres absolutely nothing there, one source said. The Trump names remain masked in the documents, and Rice would not have been able to know in all cases that she was asking the N.S.A. to unmask the names of Trump officials.
Nunes is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee because, in talking about the documents, he may have leaked classified information. But this is like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. The bigger scandal is the coördinated effort to use the American intelligence services to manufacture an excuse for Trumps original tweet.
The intelligence source told me that he knows, from talking to people in the intelligence community, that the White House said, We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the Presidents tweet that he was being surveilled. They put out an all-points bulletina call to sift through intelligence reportsand said, We need to find something that justifies the Presidents crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower. And Im telling you there is no way you get that from those transcripts, which are about as plain vanilla as can be. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
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