House Intel Report Finds “No Evidence” of Collusion Between Trump and Russia

(ZHE) — Weeks after the House Intelligence Committee voted to officially close its investigation into whether President Trump colluded with the Russians, it has finally released its official account of its findings in a heavily redacted 253-page report which unambiguously proclaims that the committee “found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, coordinated, or conspired with the Russian […]

House Permanent Select Committee Intel Chair Devin Nunes goes after DOJ and FBI for not producing subpoenaed documents or witnesses

‘This behavior that can no longer be tolerated’

WASHINGTON (INTELLIHUB) — House Permanent Select Committee Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein Friday in response to The Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “failure to produce” key documents and witnesses that were subpoenaed over four months ago which relate to the Trump/Steele dossier.

Chairman Nunes is extremely frustrated with the way things are being handled in the D.C. swamp and has instructed the DOJ and FBI “promptly produce to the committee — no later than January 3, 2017 — All outstanding records identified as responsive to the August 24 subpoenas.”

Additionally, Nunes has requested that by the same deadline the following officials must confirm interview, sometime in January:

• Former DOJ Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr;


• FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) Peter Strzok;


• FBI Attorney James Baker;


• FBI Attorney Lisa Page;


• FBI Attorney Sally Moyer and;


• FBI Assistant Director for Congressional Affairs Greg Brower

The chairman also made clear that all of this is “part of a broader pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated.”

Featured Image: Screen capture CNN/YouTube

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Shepard Ambellas is an opinion journalist, analyst, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News & Politics (Intellihub.com). Shepard is also known for producing Shade: The Motion Picture (2013) and appearing on Travel Channel’s America Declassified (2013). Shepard is a regular contributor to Infowars. Read more from Shep’s World. Follow Shep on Facebook. Subscribe to Shep’s YouTube channel.

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House Republicans Secretly Gathering Evidence To Launch Case Against DOJ and FBI: Report

According to Politico, a group of frustrated Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee led by Devin Nunes (R-CA) have been gathering in secret for several weeks to build a case against senior leaders of the Justice Department and the FBI for what they say is "improper" and perhaps criminal mishandling of the salacious and unproven 34-page Trump-Russia dossier, according to four sources familiar with their plans. 

Devin Nunes (R-CA)

A subset of the Republican members of the House intelligence committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes of California, has been quietly working parallel to the committee’s high-profile inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. […]

 

The people familiar with Nunes’ plans said the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. The group hopes to release a report early next year detailing their concerns about the DOJ and FBI, and they might seek congressional votes to declassify elements of their evidence. -Politico

When pressed for details, Reps Mike Conway (R-TX) and Peter King (R-NY) were mum, with Conway telling POLITICO, "I don"t want talk about what we do behind closed doors." 

Nunes" has gone on record several times to discuss his feelings over the government law enforcement, telling Fox News "I hate to use the word corrupt, but they"ve become at least so dirty that who"s watching the watchmen? Who"s investigating these people?" adding "There is no one." 

House and Senate Republicans have joined countless voices, including President Trump"s outside counsel, Jay Sekulow, to launch a second Special Counsel to investigate the FBI and Justice Department to find out what role the salacious dossier played in the Trump-Russia investigation, as well as a trove of anti-Trump text messages sent between lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok to his FBI attorney mistress Lisa Page while the two of them were working together on both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation.

Republicans in the Nunes-led group suspect the FBI and DOJ have worked either to hurt Trump or aid his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, a sense that has pervaded parts of the president’s inner circle. Trump has long called the investigations into whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election a “witch hunt,” and on Tuesday, his son Donald Trump Jr. told a crowd in Florida the probes were part of a “rigged system” by “people at the highest levels of government” who were working to hurt the president.

House Intel Committee member Jim Jordan (R-OH) told Fox News yesterday that they are now considering contempt of the FBI and DOJ leadership and subpoenas over anti-Trump bias:

I think they were putting together a plan to stop Donald Trump from being the next president of the United States. I think it’s amazing in spite of the fact that the Democrats were against him, the Republican establishment was against him, the mainstream press was against him. and now I believe the FBI and the Justice Department were against him, the American people still said that’s the guy we want to be the next president.

“I believe that fake dossier was used as the basis to get Warren to now what we learn about Peter Strzok and Bruce Ohr and the FBI and the Justice Department,” said Jordan, adding, “Everything points to the fact that there was an orchestrated plan to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the President of the United States.”

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Meanwhile, Trey Gowdy - who notably chose not to call on key witness Peter Strzok or demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr for testimony - is apparently not included in the group seeking to build a case. As POLITICO reports, "A congressional aide with knowledge of the meetings said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was not among the participants. ”While he does believe the FBI and DOJ have recently made decisions worth looking into, he is and will always be a defender of the FBI, DOJ and the special counsel," the aide said.

Intel Committee Demands Fusion GPS Bank Records; Suspects Journalists Paid To Spread "Russian Collusion" Claims

For nearly a year now we"ve all been inundated with 24x7 media coverage of the "Russian Collusion" narrative which suggests, among other things, that various members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton and then used social media to spread that damaging information far and wide, thus causing Hillary"s inevitable second failed bid for the White House.

That said, what if it wasn"t the Trump administration, but rather the Hillary campaign and Democrats who were guilty of all the "Russian Collusion" crimes they"ve been screaming about for the better part of year now? 

Of course, we already know that it was Hillary"s campaign and the DNC that paid for the Trump dossier (see: Hillary Clinton Lied, Paid For "Trump Dossier").  We also know that most of the sources listed in the dossier were based in Russia and include a "senior Kremlin official" as well as other "close associates of Vladimir Putin." 

Moreover, as CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell noted recently, it"s highly likely that some portion of the funds paid to Perkins Coie by the DNC and Hillary campaign made it"s way into the pockets of those "senior Kremlin officials" as compensation for their services.

In the dossier, Steele cites numerous anonymous sources, many of which work in the upper echelons of the Russian government.

 

The first two sources cited in the dossier’s first memo, dated June 20, 2016, are “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.”

 

A third source is referred to as “a senior Russian financial official.” Other sources in the dossier are described as “a senior Kremlin official” and sources close to Igor Sechin, the head of Russian oil giant Rosneft and a close associate of Vladimir Putin’s.

Now, according to a report from The Washington Times, Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, seems to have reason to believe that Fusion GPS, and therefore Hillary and the DNC, may have paid journalists to spread the Russian collusion narrative which looks increasingly like nothing more than a cleverly crafted myth.

The role of reporters is taking on added importance in federal court battles over the infamous Russia dossier that leveled unverified charges of collusion against the Donald Trump campaign.

 

In U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Fusion GPS, the dossier’s financier via the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign money, is fighting a House committee chairman’s bid to find out if the opposition research firm paid journalists.

 

Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, signed a subpoena to force a bank to turn over Fusion’s financial records. He wants to know who paid for the dossier, which was written in a series of 18 memos by former British spy Christopher Steele. He relied almost exclusively on unidentified Kremlin sources.

 

Fusion went to federal court to block the move, but the law firm Perkins Coie LLP, whose partner Marc E. Elias is the Clinton’s campaign’s general counsel, intervened. It filed a letter acknowledging it had paid Fusion for the dossier on behalf of Democrats. Fusion and Mr. Nunes then worked out an agreement on access to some of the firm’s financial records.

 

But the dispute heightened again Friday as Fusion renewed its request for a judge to block the subpoena because Mr. Nunes wants more information. The widened net includes the names of journalists and law firms that Fusion might have paid.

To our great "shock", in court arguments Fusion did not deny making payments to journalists but simply cited First Amendment protection and confidentiality.

“It is contrived to substitute for the ridiculous notion that Intervenor [the House committee] can demand documents in an overbroad subpoena from a third party and not explain what it is looking for or why,” said a memorandum filed by Fusion’s law firm, Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.

 

“And they are not pertinent, as they are not related to Russia or Donald Trump,” Fusion argues. “In attempting to justify the overbroad subpoena earlier, Intervenor could have, but of course did not, argue the relevance to its inquiry of any such payments.”

 

In the court battle with Mr. Nunes, Fusion has likened itself to a group of journalists with all associated rights. Its founders include former Wall Street Journal reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch.

All of which again raises the very obvious question of why a Special Prosecutor was required to investigate the Trump campaign on nothing more than a series of rumors while no such Special Prosecutor seems to be necessary to investigate the Hillary campaign even after her own general counsel admitted to the same "crimes" of which Trump was accused?

House Committees Announce Investigation Into Hillary"s Approval Of Russia"s Uranium One Deal

Today is shaping up to be a fairly bad day for Hillary Clinton.  Just moments after the House Judiciary and Oversight committees announced an investigation into Comey"s handling of the Hillary email investigation, the House Intelligence and Oversight committees have also announced an investigation in the Uranium One deal which handed Russia 20% of America"s uranium reserves and landed the Clinton Foundation some $145 million in donations and a $500,000 speaking gig for former President Bill Clinton.

As we"ve pointed out over the past couple of days, the Uranium One deal has recently resurfaced in public discussion after a former FBI informant came forward suggesting that he personally witnessed Russian operatives in a massive bribery, extortion and money laundering scheme discussing efforts to curry favor with the Clintons. The informant has requested an audience with certain Congressional committees but has so far been silenced by an NDA he signed with the FBI.

Here are a couple of our recent posts on the topic as a recap:

• FBI Uncovered Russian Bribery Plot Before Obama Approved Uranium One Deal, Netting Clintons Millions


• Emails Reveal Bill Clinton Met With Vladimir Putin Just Before Uranium One Deal


• FBI Informant "Threatened" After Offering Details Linking Clinton Foundation To Russian Bribery Case

As the The Hill points out, the Uranium One investigation will initially look into whether or not the FBI bothered to investigate the circumstances surrounding the approval of the deal which occurred during their ongoing investigation.

Two powerful House committees on Tuesday announced a joint investigation into the 2010 sale of a U.S. uranium company to a Russian company.

 

The two panels, the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees, will first probe whether there was an FBI investigation into the deal, approved when former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

 

Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) on Monday cited “very, very real concerns about why we would allow a Russian-owned company to get access to 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.”

 

“It’s important we find out why that deal went through.”

 

A confidential informant has come forward to the committees, according to Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), and the two panels are currently in discussions with the Justice Department to release that individual from a nondisclosure agreement.

Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes told reporters earlier that it"s too early to determine whether Hillary will be called to testify.

“It’s a little premature. Let us first determine whether or not there was an open investigation by FBI or DOJ and then we’ll get back to you with more information,” Nunes told reporters.

WATCH LIVE: House Intel committee chair Devin Nunes holds a press conference https://t.co/T5uqoA85rO pic.twitter.com/pgfbQB0yBu

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 24, 2017

Of course, Hillary once againg reiterated that concerns over the approval of the Uranium One deal, a deal which netted her family foundation $145 million in donations, by a committee on which she served is nothing but "politically motivated baloney."

Firm Behind "Trump Dossier" Refuses To Comply With Congressional Subpoena

The three co-founders of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm responsible for overseeing the creation of the infamous “Trump dossier”, will refuse to comply with a subpoena ordered by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, according to a letter from their attorneys originally obtained by Business Insider.

But experts say the argument their lawyers are using to ask that they be excused relies on shaky legal grounds, and is unlikely to hold.

Attorneys from Cunningham, Levy & Muse said in a letter that, if called to testify, their clients planned to invoke their first amendment rights to exempt them from answering questions. The move - which has all the hallmarks of a stalling tactic - is the latest attempt by the firm’s founders, who reportedly were aware that not all of the allegations contained in the dossier were credible before turning it over to the FBI, to forestall delivering public testimony. Glenn Simpson, a former WSJ investigative reporter and one of the firm’s three founders, met privately with the Senate Judiciary Committee for ten hours over the summer. Afterwards, a group of senators, including Democrat Richard Blumenthal, pushed for Simpson’s testimony to be made public, and the committee is reportedly still mulling whether to release it.

However, Simpson and his fellow Fusion GPS co-founders Thomas Catan and Peter Fritsch, plan to invoke constitutional privileges and decline to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, their attorney wrote in a letter obtained by Business Insider on Monday.

"We cannot in good conscience do anything but advise our clients to stand on their constitutional privileges, the attorney work product doctrine and contractual obligations," wrote Fusion GPS counsel Josh Levy in response to subpoenas issued earlier this month by the committee"s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes.

Levy argued that complying with the subpoenas would violate "the First Amendment rights" of the cofounders "and would chill any American running for office ... from conducting confidential opposition research in an election."

"Should you compel any of our three clients to appear at the scheduled deposition, they will invoke their constitutional privileges not to testify," Levy wrote. "Since that will be the case, we ask that the Committee excuse them from appearing."

Imprisoned former Pharma CEO Martin Shkreli pled the fifth – the right against self-incrimination – when he appeared before a Congressional panel about prescription-drug pricing in February 2016. At the time, he had been indicted on eight counts of fraud.

Though he officially resigned from the investigation in April following his decision to brief Trump and the press about classified intelligence without first informing his fellow committee members, Nunes has helped steer the committee’s inquiry toward “unmaskings” ordered by Susan Rice and the credibility of the dossier. Many of the dossier’s most egregious claims – such as one alleging that the Russian government was in possession of an embarrassing video of the president – have been debunked.

Levy contended in the letter that Nunes" "unilateral issuance of these subpoenas violates your recusal and further undermines the legitimacy of this investigation."

Nunes reportedly issued the subpoenas just 24 hours after Fusion"s counsel met with "majority and minority staff" for approximately an hour to discuss "a way forward for voluntary cooperation."

"Based on this Committee’s bad faith interactions with the undersigned counsel and its pattern of unprofessional conduct exhibited during different points throughout this investigation, you have left us with no choice but to advise our clients to assert their privileges in the face of these subpoenas," Levy wrote.

Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, told Business Insider that Fusion’s “novel” legal strategy was unlikely to succeed.

"That is probably why the attorneys have emphasized other arguments, like Nunes" apparent lack of authority to issue the subpoenas and the fact that Congress didn"t authorize the investigation he"s conducting on his own," Mariotti said.

"Those arguments have more merit, and they draw attention to Nunes" zarre behavior over the past month — including his subpoenas to the DOJ," he added. "That said, if the subpoenas issued by Nunes are valid, then I expect these individuals will be held in contempt if they refuse to testify as ordered."

Republican Rep. Mike Conaway, who is now heading the committee"s investigation, reportedly approved Nunes" subpoenas to Fusion GPS, but House Intelligence Democrats told BI that they weren’t consulted.

Nunes reportedly turned his attention toward Fusion after the FBI refused to turn over documents pertaining to the dossier that were requested by Nunes. The chairman says he’s seeking the documents to help determine how the dossier played into the DOJ’s decision to launch multiple investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election – including claims that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to sway the vote in Trump’s favor.

DOJ has maintained that publicly disclosing the information that Nunes is requesting could compromise an ongoing investigation.

Last month, Senate Intel Committee Chairman Richard Burr said the committee’s investigators had “hit a wall” in their efforts to verify the claims contained in the dossier, in part because investigators couldn’t convince former British spy Christopher Steele, the man hired by Fusion to compile the dossier, to meet with them. However, CNN later reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had managed to interview Steele. While it’s unclear which, if any, of the claims contained in the dossier are true, the US intelligence community opted to omit the allegations from a crucial report released in January.

In summary, after months of resisting investigators’ overtures, it looks like the men behind Fusion GPS will finally be forced to answer some uncomfortable questions about the role they played in fostering the current climate of anti-Russia hysteria. We look forward to hearing what they have to say.

Read the letter below:

361738857-2017-10-16-Letter-to-Chair-D-Nunes by zerohedge on Scribd

Coverup? FBI, DOJ Refuse To Comply With Congressional "Trump Dossier" Subpoena

In what looks like a naked coverup meant to obscure the fact that the Department of Justice"s decision to launch a criminal investigation into possible Russia-Trump collusion was based on a lie, Reuters reports that the DOJ and FBI are resisting a Congressional subpoena from to turn over documents that would reveal details about how the infamous "Trump dossier" factored into their decision to launch said investigation.

Despite receiving the subpoena from US Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, the FBI is steadfastly refusing to turn over the documents because the agency says they would purportedly compromise an ongoing criminal investigation (the FBI’s investigation into Mueller). More likely, the agency’s intransigence stems from fears that the one Russia collusion narrative that Democrats have actively worked to suppress could come back to haunt them.

The U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee issued subpoenas in August seeking “any and all documents” about both agencies’ dealings with former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, according to a letter seen by Reuters from committee chairman Devin Nunes, a Trump supporter.

Steele compiled the so-called Trump dossier, which Trump was told by FBI director James Comey contained salacious material about the businessman-turned president. Trump and his associates have said the dossier’s contents were false.

As we noted earlier this month when the subpoenas were first filed, the now-infamous Trump dossier was provided to the FBI even though it contained knowingly inaccurate allegations. Russia-born financier and Putin opponent Bill Browder revealed as much during an explosive piece of testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee over the summer that was multilaterally ignored by the media, when he claimed that the document was indirectly financed by a “senior Russian government official.”

Unsurprisingly, Nunes and his fellow Republicans are spearheading the subpoena effort, while Democrats on the committee, including leading anti-Trumper Adam Schiff, have resisted their efforts at every turn, claiming the subpoenas are part of a plan to try and "discredit" the dossier"s author, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

To be sure, many of the claims Steele made in the dossier have already been discredited. For example, the FBI has found no evidence, for example, supporting the dossier’s its claim that an attorney for Mr. Trump went to the Czech Republic to meet Kremlin officials, U.S. officials said. The attorney has also denied the claim.

For their part, Republicans on the committee contend that understanding the genesis of the dossier, and whether it was created with the explicit intention of sabotaging Trump, is important.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee has also been battling with the Justice Department for months over its request to interview two FBI officials about Trump’s dismissal in May of Comey as FBI chief, according to letters from the committee and the department. On Sept. 22, it agreed that it would be “appropriate” for the officials to testify provided that it would be in a classified setting and did not interfere with Mueller’s inquiry.

Not unlike the Ring of Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings”, the Trump dossier has created problems for everyone who has touched it. Buzzfeed is being sued for defamation by an individual who was named in the dossier in a case that bears several eerie similarities to the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that killed Gawker. CNN published a series of embarrassing clarifications and retractions. Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, has been widely criticized for its role in creating the document, and one of its founders was finally compelled to privately testify before a Senate committee after months of dragging his feet.

It has embarrassed the DOJ, which reportedly cited some of its unproven allegations as justification for launching a criminal probe into the Trump campaign – a probe that has dragged on for nearly nine months now, without producing anything that looks like actionable evidence against the president.

It’s long past time for the intelligence agencies to come clean about how the document factored into their thinking. Considering the volume of leaks meant to convey the implication of shadiness without providing anything in the way of actual evidence of collusion, it’s understandable why Trump’s loyalists in Congress want to expose the lies underpinning the collusion narrative.
 

Report: Former Obama Aide Ben Rhodes Now 'Person Of Interest' In House Intel Probe Of Unmaskings

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

The noose is tightening...

Ben Rhodes, former aide to President Obama, is a "person of interest" in the House Intel Committee"s unmasking investigation, according to Sara Carter of Circa News.

Former Obama White House National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes is now an emerging as a person of interest in the House Intelligence Committee’s unmasking investigation, according to a letter sent Tuesday by the committee to the National Security Agency (NSA). This adds Rhodes to the growing list of top Obama government officials who may have improperly unmasked Americans in communications intercepted overseas by the NSA, Circa has confirmed.

House Intel Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) reportedly sent a letter to the NSA requesting information on the number of "unmasking" requests Rhodes made between Jan 1, 2016 and Jan 20, 2017, and have requested that the information be made available to the committee no later than August 21.

All Rhodes lead to jail?

If the unmasking rumors are true, Rhodes - a former deputy national security advisor under Obama, is in deep shit - joining a list of Obama admin officials included in the House Intel Committee probe, along with former CIA director John Brennan, Susan Rice, and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power. A letter sent last week from Nunes to Trump"s director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, suggested that hundreds of unmasking requests were made during the 2016 presidential elections.

Per Circa:

The story, which was first reported by The Hill last week, stated that the requests were made without specific justifications as to why the unmasking was necessary. Rice and Brennan have confirmed they sought the unredacted names of Americans in NSA-sourced intelligence reports but insisted their requests were routine parts of their work and had no nefarious intentions.

Power also has legal authority to unmask officials, though the practice has not reportedly been common for someone in her position.

Last week, the Washington Examiner reported that Ben Rhodes sat down with the House Intelligence Committee, the same day Jared Kushner apparently dazzled them with his performance.

It was already known that Jared Kushner, top adviser and son-in-law to President Trump, on Tuesday spoke with members of the panel, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign. CNN’s Manu Raju tweeted Tuesday evening that the network’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger had learned that Rhodes also spoke to the committee.

The Intelligence Committee is investigating intelligence leaks, and Rhodes has become a person of interest for certain Republicans as someone who may be playing a role in the leaking of classified information from the Trump administration to reporters.

This news follows a report that Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) named Ben Rhodes as the creator of an "in-house echo chamber" meant to mislead reporters and the public about President Obama"s nuclear deal with Iran, stating “Any Obama holdover at any of these agencies, you’ve got to get them out of there because clearly they’re not on the same team and particularly on the [White House] National Security Council," adding “I think Congress and some members of the Intelligence Committee can call Ben Rhodes to testify . . . He may be able to invoke executive privilege from when Obama was president but he definitely can’t do that in any interactions he’s had since then." -Washington Free Beacon

Obama Aide Ben Rhodes will look great in an Orange jumpsuit #Busted #Unmasking #Jailtime

— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) August 2, 2017

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House Intel. Chair Accuses Obama Staffers of "Hundreds Of Unmasking Requests"

After being forced to recuse himself from his committee"s investigation of the "Russian meddling" controversy earlier this year (see: House Intel Committee Chair Nunes Recuses Himself From Russia Probe), Devin Nunes has thrust himself back into the national spotlight by drafting a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, saying he has evidence that several of Obama"s top political aides made hundreds of unmasking requests in the waning days of Obama"s administration even though they offered no legitimate reason to do so and some of them didn"t even serve in an intelligence position.

In Thursday’s letter, Nunes said the total requests for Americans’ names by Obama political aides numbered in the hundreds during Obama’s last year in office and often lacked a specific intelligence community justification. He called the lack of proper justifications a “serious deficiency.”

His letter noted requests from senior government officials, unlike career intelligence analysts, “made remarkably few individualized justifications for access” to the U.S. names.

“The committee has learned that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration,” Nunes wrote. “Of those requests, only one offered a justification that was not boilerplate.”

“We have found evidence that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information."

Of course, we pointed out last week (see: New Scapegoat Emerges In Unmasking Scandal: Meet Obama"s Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power) that the official "whose position had no apparent intelligence related function" was likely Obama"s U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power.

Power appears to be central to efforts by top Obama administration officials to identify individuals named in classified intelligence community reports related to Trump and his presidential transition team.  If true, Power"s role in the unmasking efforts would be particularly questionable since it"s nearly inconceivable that her position as the U.N. ambassador would require such sensitive unmasking activities.

"Unmasking is not a regular occurrence—absolutely not a weekly habit. It is rare, even at the National Security Council, and ought to be rarer still for a U.N. ambassador," according to one former senior U.S. official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

"It might be defended when the communication in question relates directly to U.N. business, for example an important Security Council vote," explained the former official, who would only discuss the matter on background. "Sometimes it might be done out of other motives than national security, such as sheer curiosity or to defend a bureaucratic position. Or just plain politics."

The Intelligence Committee"s focus of Power and other key Obama officials is a prime example of the Obama administration"s efforts to spy on those close to Trump, according to sources familiar with the ongoing investigation.

"The subpoena for Power suggests just how pervasive the Obama administration"s spying on Americans actually was," said one veteran GOP political operative who has been briefed on the matter by senior Congressional intelligence officials. "The U.N. ambassador has absolutely no business calling for the quantity and quality of the intelligence that Power seems to have been asking for."

"That"s just not the sort of thing that she should have been concerned about, unless she was playing the role of political operative with the help of the intelligence community," the source said. "It gives away what was actually going on: the Obama administration was operating in a pervasive culture of impunity and using the intelligence community against their political opponents."

So, you"re saying that while Americans were being distracted with a barrage of "Russian meddling" stories, that Obama was working behind the scenes to transform our various intelligence agencies in this country into his very own political weapons of mass destruction? 

That sounds like a very serious 4th Amendment issue...we"re starting to see what the FISA courts were getting at:

"Since 2011, NSA"s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702.  The October 26, 2016 Notice informed the Court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court."

"At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government"s failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional "lack of candor" on NSA"s part and emphasized that "this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.""

It's Not Over - House Intel Panel Calls Comey, Clapper, Rogers, Brennan, & Yates To Testify On Russia

Just when you thought it was over - after Trump "Tomahawks" Putin"s pal Assad, and Tillerson trounces Lavrov - and the media had stopped the constant "Russia did it" narrative, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (which seems like as big an oxymoron as can occur) has called numerous current (and former) officials to testify once again on Russia"s "active measures during the 2016 election."

As NBC Nightly News reports,

As The Hill reports, the Yates hearing would be scheduled after the Comey and Rogers appearance, slated for May 2. Former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have also been invited to testify with Yates. The timing of the two hearings has been a point of fierce partisan contention on the panel and has been one of many fights that has threatened to explode the committee"s investigation.  The open panel, featuring Yates, had previously been scheduled in March, but was canceled by committee chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

The Washington Post reported at the time that the White House sought to block her from testifying, a charge that Press Secretary Sean Spicer has denied.

Nunes said that the hearing had been nixed to make room for a closed-door briefing with Comey and Rogers — but Democrats argued that Nunes was attempting to prevent a testimony expected to be damaging to the president.

The week before, Comey in an open setting had revealed the existence of the FBI’s investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Reports have suggested that Yates, who was fired by Trump for refusing to defend in court his original travel ban, was expected to provide testimony that would conflict with comments from White House staff.

It was she who alerted the White House that former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had misled Vice President Pence about the content of his calls to the Russian ambassador. The public revelation of those calls led to his resignation in February.

This circus is far from over.

House Intel Panel Wants Susan Rice To Testify

If former National Security Advisor Susan Rice though she could get away from the current furore over the Trump "unmasking" scandal with just one MSNBC interview in which Andrea Mitchell did not even ask her why she lied two weeks ago to PBS, she will be disappointed because the House Intelligence Committee has officially asked Susan Rice to testify, supposedly under oath.

As the WSJ reports, citing two officials familiar with the matter, Rice who served as national security adviser under former President Barack Obama, is on a list of witnesses drawn up by the committee as part of its probe. House Republicans and Democrats have agreed upon a preliminary list of about 30 witnesses that officials say will be expanded as needed. Formal requests to testify haven’t been sent yet by the committee to the witnesses.

As everyone knows by now, the White House and Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the House panel’s chairman, have charged the Obama administration improperly used surveillance information that included “unmasking” the names of Trump transition team members for political gain ahead of handing over the White House.

Earlier on Tuesday, speaking to MSNBC, Rice said she didn’t use intelligence about Mr. Trump’s associates for political purposes and said she didn’t leak anything regarding her successor, Mike Flynn. In the television interview, she also described requests to unmask the identities of Americans mentioned in intelligence reports as necessary to do her job and entirely different than leaking classified information.

“The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of an American person, that is the same as leaking it, is completely false,” Ms. Rice said on MSNBC. “There’s no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking. The effort to ask for the identity of the American citizen is necessary to understand the importance of an intelligence report in some instances.”

However, she declined to comment on whether she had made such requests with respect to people associated with Trump who may have been mentioned in intelligence reports. She was also not asked why she lied in an interview two weeks ago on PBS in which she said she had no information about any "unmasking."

A Republican official familiar with deliberations by GOP lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee said the names of two U.S. citizens who were part of the Trump transition team have been unmasked in intelligence reports. One is Mr. Flynn and the other hasn’t been identified, said the official, adding that this person appeared in a report that had nothing to do with Russia, unlike the report featuring Mr. Flynn, which documented phone conversations he had in late December with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

Flynn was forced to resign after misleading White House officials and Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of those conversations, which current and former officials said concerned the possible easing of Obama-era sanctions on Russia. The existence of those conversations was leaked to the media in January, almost exclusively to the WaPo and NYT.

The question is who did the leaking.

The Republican official and others said Rice wasn’t the administration official who instigated Flynn’s unmasking. Rice acknowledged in her televised interview Tuesday that she requested names of Americans be unmasked in intelligence files. But she refused to comment about whether she sought the unmasking of any Trump transition members.

“The additional unmasking of an American is a disaster,” the Republican official said. “There was no reason to unmask that name.”

Rice said in the MSNBC interview that she couldn’t get into which names were unmasked in specific reports. “I don’t know what Devin Nunes reviewed at the White House,” she said. “What I can say is that  there is an established process for senior national security officials to ask for the identity of U.S. persons in these reports.” Rice also said she didn’t know what reports were being referred to “by those who are putting out this story.” 

“I don’t know what time frame they were from, I don’t know the subject matter, and I don’t know who they think was collected upon,” she said.

Rice also said she didn’t leak the name of Mr. Flynn.  “I leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never would,” Rice said.

WATCH: Susan Rice insists “I leaked nothing to nobody” https://t.co/kAsbu4VJDN

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 4, 2017

The process of unmasking, like many actions within the U.S. intelligence apparatus, is highly secretive and contentious because they themselves are classified and revealing them publicly could be a crime.

And while Susan Rice may not have "known" much in her MSNBC interview, she will have to come up with answers during her sworn testimony.

At which point the only question on everyone"s lips will be: will she plead the Fifth?

Schiff Accuses Intel Chair Nunes Of Conspiring With Trump To Distract From Russia Probe

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, accused the White House and Devin Nunes, his Republican counterpart and the Chair of the House Intel Committee, of conspiring to divert attention from Moscow’s actions.  Schiff said Nunes had colluded with Trump as part of a White House ploy, in an “attempt to distract” the public from links between Trump and Russian meddling.

Schiff said on CNN’s State of the Union that Nunes and the White House had made an “effort to point the Congress in other directions, to basically say, ‘Don’t look at me, don’t look at Russia, there’s nothing to see here’.”

“It certainly is an attempt to distract and to hide the origin of the materials, to hide the White House"s hand. The question is, of course, why? And I think the answer to the question is this effort to point the Congress in other directions, basically say, ‘Don"t look at me, don"t look at Russia, there is nothing to see here,’” Schiff said.

Schiff also slammed Nunes for the way in which he reviewed the source’s intelligence reports. “It doesn"t need to be done, you know, by night through stealth at the White House. The only reason to do that, again, is if you want to hide where these materials are really coming from and who is behind it,” the Democratic lawmaker said, adding that both the Senate and House intelligence committees should be able to review the documents.

Schiff on Friday viewed the documents, telling Tapper on Sunday some red flags were raised.  “First, the deputy assistant to the White House informed me when I went to see them that these are exactly the same materials that were shown to the chairman. Now, this is a very interesting point. How does the White House know that these are the same materials that were shown to the chairman, if the White House wasn"t aware what the chairman was being shown?” Schiff asked. 

“And the second point was also made to me. And this is -- I think was also underscored by Sean Spicer -- and that is, it was told to me by the deputy assistant that these materials were produced in the ordinary course of business,” Schiff added.

That said, Schiff largely ignored to discuss the essence of the docs, and whether they confirmed what Nunes said, namely that Trump had indeed been the subject of surveillance; instead reverting back to the narrative that the events detracted from his priority: investigating Russia’s interference in the election.

“I think part of the reason why that was done is this effort to deflect attention from the Russia investigation, to raise other issues, to effectively create a cloud through which the public cannot see what is at stake here. And what is at stake here is a foreign intervention in our election, a very serious issue about whether U.S. persons were involved, an investigation that is being conducted by the FBI into possible coordination with the Trump campaign,” Schiff said.

* * *

Meanwhile, Trump over the weekend continued to seize on Nunes’s original allegation that the identities of Americans caught up in the surveillance had been improperly “unmasked” by US officials, for internal use during the Obama presidency. “If this is true, does not get much bigger,” Trump said on Twitter. “Would be sad for US” On Sunday he added: “The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and LEAKING! Find the leakers.”

The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and LEAKING! Find the leakers.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2017

Schiff in turn responded by saying that “alarm bells” should go off whenever President Trump calls something “fake”: “I would tell people, whenever they see the president use the word "fake," it ought to set off alarm bells,” Schiff told CNN"s Jake Tapper.

Schiff added that the the White House is trying to mislead the country into believing there is no connection between Russian officials and Trump campaign associates, which - again - is an odd thing to say for the House Intel Committee member who complains that he is unable to conclude his probe due to distractions by Trump, unless of course he has decided what the conclusion of the "investigation" will be ahead of time.

And so, despite the FBI admitting on several occasions that there does not appear to be any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, the media circuit continues to be wrapped tighly around this narrative which serves as the true public distraction, and as a strawman foil to accuse anyone who is, or voted against Hillary Clinton/the establishment - now including supporters of Bernie Sanders - of being "influenced" by Putin, in what has become the biggest US witch hunt since Joe McCarthy.

How Obama's White House Weaponized Media Against Trump

Authored op-ed by Michael Doran via The Hill,

Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Adam Schiff have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.  They should think twice.  The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance to anyone who cares about fundamental civil liberties.

The trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a particularly significant leak.  On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that “according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike) Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29.”

From Nunes’s statements, it’s clear that he suspects that this information came from NSA intercepts of Kislyak’s phone.  An Obama official, probably in the White House, “unmasked” Flynn’s name and passed it on to Ignatius.

Regardless of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a violation of his civil rights.  But it was also a severe breach of the public trust. When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House, 2005-2007, I read dozens of NSA surveillance reports every day. On the basis of my familiarity with this system, I strongly suspect that someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in the thin wall that prevents the government from using information collected from surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is pledged to protect.  

The leaking of Flynn’s name was part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate.  On Dec. 29, Obama announced sanctions against Russia as retribution for its hacking activities.  From that date until Trump’s inauguration, the White House aggressively pumped into the media two streams of information: one about Russian hacking; the other about Trump’s Russia connection. In the hands of sympathetic reporters, the two streams blended into one.  

A report that appeared the day after Obama announced the sanctions shows how.  On Dec. 30, the Washington Post reported on a Russian effort to penetrate the electricity grid by hacking into a Vermont utility, Burlington Electric Department.  After noting the breach, the reporters offered a senior administration official to speculate on the Russians’ motives.  Did they seek to crash the system, or just to probe it?  

This infrastructure hack, the story continued, was part of a broader hacking campaign that included intervention in the election.  The story then moved to Trump: “He…has spoken highly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite President Obama’s suggestion that the approval for hacking came from the highest levels of the Kremlin.”

The national media mimicked the Post’s reporting.  But there was a problem: the hack never happened.  It was a false alarm — triggered, it eventually became clear, by Obama’s hype.

On Dec. 29, the DHS and FBI published a report on Russian hacking, which showed the telltale signs of having been rushed to publication.  “At every level this report is a failure,” said cyber security expert Robert M. Lee. “It didn’t do what it set out to do, and it didn’t provide useful data. They’re handing out bad information.”

Especially damaging were the hundreds of Internet addresses, supposedly linked to Russian hacking, that the report contained.  The FBI and DHS urged network administrators to load the addresses into their system defenses.  Some of the addresses, however, belong to platforms that are widely used by the public, including Yahoo servers.  At Burlington Electric, an unsuspecting network administrator dutifully loaded the addresses into the monitoring system of the utility’s network.  When an employee checked his email, it registered on the system as if Russian hackers were trying to break in.

While the White House was hyping the Russia threat, elements of the press showed a sudden interest in the infamous Steele dossier, which claimed that Russian intelligence services had caught Trump in Moscow in highly compromising situations.  The dossier was opposition research paid for by Trump’s political opponents, and it had circulated for months among reporters covering the election.  Because it was based on anonymous sources and entirely unverifiable, however, no reputable news organization had dared to touch it.  

With a little help from the Obama White House, the dossier became fair game for reporters.  A government leak let it be known that the intelligence community had briefed Trump on the dossier.  If the president-elect was discussing it with his intelligence briefers, so the reasoning went, perhaps there was something to it after all.

By turning the dossier into hard news, that leak weaponized malicious gossip. The same is true of the Flynn-Kislyak leak.  Ignatius used the leak to deepen speculation about collusion between Putin and Trump: “What did Flynn say (to Kislyak),” Ignatius asked, “and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?” The mere fact that Flynn’s conversations were being monitored deepened his appearance of guilt.  If he was innocent, why was the government monitoring him?

It should not have been.  He had the right to talk to in private — even to a Russian ambassador.  Regardless of what one thinks about him or Trump or Putin, this leak should concern anyone who believes that we must erect a firewall between the national security state and our domestic politics.  The system that allowed it to happen must be reformed.  At stake is a core principle of our democracy: that elected representatives control the government, and not vice versa.

"If True, Does Not Get Much Bigger" Trump Tweets About "Very Well Known" Intel Official Behind Trump "Unmasking"

After slamming NBC"s coverage of the "Fake Trump/Russia story", congratulating the NYTimes for "finally getting it" on Obamacare, Trump on Saturday commented on the previously discussed Fox News story about a "very senior, very well known" U.S. intelligence official who was allegedly involved in unmasking the names of Trump associates, and who had reprotedly surveilled Trump before the nomination.

"Wow, @FoxNews just reporting big news. Source: "Official behind unmasking is high up. Known Intel official is responsible. Some unmasked not associated with Russia. Trump team spied on before he was nominated. If this is true, does not get much bigger. Would be sad for U.S.," he added.

Wow, @FoxNews just reporting big news. Source: "Official behind unmasking is high up. Known Intel official is responsible. Some unmasked....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2017

..not associated with Russia. Trump team spied on before he was nominated." If this is true, does not get much bigger. Would be sad for U.S.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2017

As discussed Friday night, A Fox News source (unnamed, because these days that"s all there is, just ask the NYT and Wapo) said that the U.S. official behind the systematic unmasking of Trump associates and private individuals was "very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world" and was doing so for political, not nationa security reasons, intent on "hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team." In other words, another intel agency war between the old, pro-Hillary Clinton, guard and the new administration.

Additionally, the Friday Fox News report cited “a number of sources” with claims that not only were the two White House officials not the sources of the information shared with Nunes, but that Nunes knew of the information in January, and that the agencies where the information came from had blocked Nunes from gaining access to it. Further, the report cited officials within the agencies who said they were frustrated with the spreading of names for political purposes.

“Our sources, who have direct knowledge of what took place, were upset because those two individuals, they say, had nothing to do with the outing of this information,” Fox reported.

“We’ve learned that the surveillance that led to the unmasking of what started way before President Trump was even the GOP nominee,” Fox News reported Adam Housley said. “The person who did the unmasking, I’m told, is very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world and is not in the FBI.”

“This led to other surveillance which led to multiple names being unmasked. Again these are private citizens in the United States,” said Housley. “This had nothing to do with Russia, I’m told, or foreign intelligence of any kind.”

“Fox also learned that an individual with direct knowledge that after Nunes had been approached by his source, the agencies basically would not allow him in at all,” said Housley.

Understandably, the Fox News report has gotten zero media attention on any other news outlet.

For those who missed the original report from Friday night, it is reproduced below.

* * *

Intel Official Behind "Unmasking" Of Trump Associates Is "Very Senior, Very Well Known"

Day after day, various media outlets, well really mostly the NYT and WaPo, have delivered Trump-administration-incriminating, Russia-link-related tape bombs sourced via leaks (in the hope of keeping the narrative alive and "resisting."). It now turns out, according to FXN report, that the US official who "unmasked" the names of multiple private citizens affiliated with the Trump team is someone "very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world."

As Malia Zimmerman and Adam Housley report, intelligence and House sources with direct knowledge of the disclosure of classified names (yes, yet another "unnamed source") said that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, now knows who is responsible - and that person is not in the FBI (i.e. it is not James Comey)

Housley said his sources were motivated to come forward by a New York Times report yesterday which reportedly outed two people who helped Nunes access information during a meeting in the Old Executive Office Building. However, Housley’s sources claim the two people who helped Nunes "navigate" to the information were not his sources. In fact, Nunes had been aware of the information since January (long before Trump"s "wiretap" tweet) but had been unable to view the documents themselves because of "stonewalling" by the agencies in question.

Our sources: This surveillance that led to the unmasking of private names of American citizens started before Trump was the GOP nominee.

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

Our sources:The person who did the unmasking is "very well known, very high up, very senior, in the intelligence world & is not in the FBI

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

Our sources: Unmasking the names and then spreading the names was for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

Our sources: "It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team"

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

For a private citizen to be “unmasked,” or named, in an intelligence report is extremely rare. Typically, the American is a suspect in a crime, is in danger or has to be named to explain the context of the report.

“The main issue in this case, is not only the unmasking of these names of private citizens, but the spreading of these names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security or an investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election,” a congressional source close to the investigation told Fox News.

The White House, meanwhile, is urging Nunes and his colleagues to keep pursuing what improper surveillance and leaks may have occurred before Trump took office. They’ve been emboldened in the wake of March 2 comments from former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas, who on MSNBC suggested her former colleagues tried to gather material on Trump team contacts with Russia.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Friday her comments and other reports raise “serious” concerns about whether there was an “organized and widespread effort by the Obama administration to use and leak highly sensitive intelligence information for political purposes.”

“Dr. Farkas’ admissions alone are devastating,” he said.

Clearly this confirms what Evelyn Farakas said, accidentally implicated the Obama White House in the surveillance of Trump"s campaign staff:

The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence.

Furthermore, Farkas effectively corroborated a New York Times article from early March which cited "Former American officials" as their anonymous source regarding efforts to leak this surveillance on the Trump team to Democrats across Washington DC.

* * *

In addition, citizens affiliated with Trump’s team who were unmasked were not associated with any intelligence about Russia or other foreign intelligence, sources confirmed. The initial unmasking led to other surveillance, which led to other private citizens being wrongly unmasked, sources said.

"Unmasking is not unprecedented, but unmasking for political purposes ... specifically of Trump transition team members ... is highly suspect and questionable,” according to an intelligence source. “Opposition by some in the intelligence agencies who were very connected to the Obama and Clinton teams was strong. After Trump was elected, they decided they were going to ruin his presidency by picking them off one by one."

* * *

So if the source isn"t Comey, has anyone seen Jim Clapper recently? The answer should emerge soon, meanwhile the ridiculous game with very high stakes of spy vs spy, or in this case source vs source, continues.

The report summarized below in video format:

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Intel Official Behind "Unmasking" Of Trump Associates Is "Very Senior, Very Well Known"

Day after day, various media outlets, well really mostly the NYT and WaPo, have delivered Trump-administration-incriminating, Russia-link-related tape bombs sourced via leaks (in the hope of keeping the narrative alive and "resisting."). It now turns out, according to FXN report, that the US official who "unmasked" the names of multiple private citizens affiliated with the Trump team is someone "very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world."

As Malia Zimmerman and Adam Housley report, intelligence and House sources with direct knowledge of the disclosure of classified names (yes, yet another "unnamed source") said that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, now knows who is responsible - and that person is not in the FBI (i.e. it is not James Comey)

Housley said his sources were motivated to come forward by a New York Times report yesterday which reportedly outed two people who helped Nunes access information during a meeting in the Old Executive Office Building. However, Housley’s sources claim the two people who helped Nunes "navigate" to the information were not his sources. In fact, Nunes had been aware of the information since January (long before Trump"s "wiretap" tweet) but had been unable to view the documents themselves because of "stonewalling" by the agencies in question.

Our sources: This surveillance that led to the unmasking of private names of American citizens started before Trump was the GOP nominee.

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

Our sources:The person who did the unmasking is "very well known, very high up, very senior, in the intelligence world & is not in the FBI

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

Our sources: Unmasking the names and then spreading the names was for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

Our sources: "It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team"

— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) March 31, 2017

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

For a private citizen to be “unmasked,” or named, in an intelligence report is extremely rare. Typically, the American is a suspect in a crime, is in danger or has to be named to explain the context of the report.

“The main issue in this case, is not only the unmasking of these names of private citizens, but the spreading of these names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security or an investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election,” a congressional source close to the investigation told Fox News.

The White House, meanwhile, is urging Nunes and his colleagues to keep pursuing what improper surveillance and leaks may have occurred before Trump took office. They’ve been emboldened in the wake of March 2 comments from former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas, who on MSNBC suggested her former colleagues tried to gather material on Trump team contacts with Russia.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Friday her comments and other reports raise “serious” concerns about whether there was an “organized and widespread effort by the Obama administration to use and leak highly sensitive intelligence information for political purposes.”

“Dr. Farkas’ admissions alone are devastating,” he said.

Clearly this confirms what Evelyn Farakas said, accidentally implicated the Obama White House in the surveillance of Trump"s campaign staff:

The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would not longer have access to that intelligence.

Furthermore, Farkas effectively corroborated a New York Times article from early March which cited "Former American officials" as their anonymous source regarding efforts to leak this surveillance on the Trump team to Democrats across Washington DC.

* * *

In addition, citizens affiliated with Trump’s team who were unmasked were not associated with any intelligence about Russia or other foreign intelligence, sources confirmed. The initial unmasking led to other surveillance, which led to other private citizens being wrongly unmasked, sources said.

"Unmasking is not unprecedented, but unmasking for political purposes ... specifically of Trump transition team members ... is highly suspect and questionable,” according to an intelligence source. “Opposition by some in the intelligence agencies who were very connected to the Obama and Clinton teams was strong. After Trump was elected, they decided they were going to ruin his presidency by picking them off one by one."

* * *

So if the source isn"t Comey, has anyone seen Jim Clapper recently? The answer should emerge soon, meanwhile the ridiculous game with very high stakes of spy vs spy, or in this case source vs source, continues.

The report summarized below in video format:

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

NY Times Outs White House Sources Who Provided Intel Reports To Nunes

In the latest development surrounding last week"s announcement by Devin Nunes, according to which President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies, the NYT reports that the pair of White House officials who played a role in providing Nunes with the intelligence reports behind his claim, have been identified.

The NYT has outed the Nunes sources, who it claims are Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.

 As reported previously, Nunes had refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe coming to the committee with sensitive information. He first disclosed the existence of the intelligence reports on March 22, and in his public comments he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.

Amusingly, the NYT adds that "the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the intelligence, and to avoid angering Mr. Cohen-Watnick and Mr. Ellis."

 In other words, the US has devolved to the point where one set of anonymous sources is doxxing another set of anonymous sources in the pursuit of a political agenda.

Cohen-Watnick is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser. The officials said that earlier this month, shortly after Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter about being wiretapped on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.

Some further background on Cohen-Watnick from forward.com:

President Donald Trump reportedly overruled a decision by National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster in order to keep a Jewish National Security Council aide in his current position. Trump overruled the decision on Sunday after Cohen-Watnick, 30, appealed to White House advisers Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Politico reported

McMaster had told Ezra Cohen-Watnick, senior director for intelligence programs at the NSC, that he would be moved to a different position at the NSC after CIA officials had pushed for his ouster, according to Politico.

A Washington consultant told Politico that Cohen-Watnick and Flynn “saw eye to eye about the failings of the CIA human intelligence operations,” and that the “CIA saw him as a threat, so they tried to unseat him and replace him with an agency loyalist.

Additionally, the NYT adds, that the intel reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle in advance of his inauguration. 

Cohen-Watnick has allegedly been reviewing the reports from his fourth-floor office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where the National Security Counsel is based.

Perhaps more importantly, the NYT sources say the description of the intelligence is in line with Mr. Nunes’s own characterization of the material, which he has said was not related to the Russia investigations when he first disclosed its existence in a hastily arranged news conference on March 22.

It was not immediately clear if now that the identity of the Nunes sources has been revealed, whether Nunes will make the contents of the confidential documents public.

White House Makes Surveillance Documents Available To Lawmakers

Even as another scandal appears to be emerging, involving Donald Trump"s former national security advisor, Mike Flynn who according to the WSJ has offered to testify in exchange for immunity, the Trump administration on Thursday invited leaders of congressional intelligence panels to review the documents it said raise indicate government spy agencies improperly identified President Donald Trump’s campaign officials and associates in the course of routine foreign surveillance.

According to Bloomberg, in a letter signed by White House Counsel Donald McGahn, the administration said Thursday it was responding to a March 15 request from intelligence committees for “documents necessary to determine whether information collected on U.S. persons was mishandled and leaked.” Specifically, it asks the committees to probe whether the intelligence was properly gathered, whether names were improperly revealed and “to the extent that U.S. citizens were subject to such surveillance, were civil liberties violated?”

The invitation announcement was made Sean Spicer during a briefing with reporters in Washington Thursday, shortly after a New York Times report that two White House officials had provided House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes with reports showing that Trump and his associates were "incidentally surveilled" by U.S. spy agencies.

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff who previously called for Nunes to recuse himself of the Russian investigation, said he’s "more than willing" to review the material but questioned the administration’s motives, saying officials may be trying to disseminate information that helps Trump’s case. “I hope they’ll have some kind of explanation for why they chose this path,” Schiff told reporters at the Capitol.

Schiff has also accused Nunes of doing the president’s bidding. On Thursday, Schiff also said that the broader investigation must continue. “This is not going to distract us from doing our Russia investigation,” Schiff said, adding that the White House action “raises profound questions.” Schiff also said he didn’t know whether the material being offered is the same as the documents that were viewed by Nunes.

Meanwhile, at an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday on Russian interference in the elections, several experts testified that Russia’s efforts began as early as 2008 and peaked during last year’s election. In a depature from the conventional narrative that only Democrats were hacked, Clint Watts, former FBI agent who is now a national security expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said other targets were prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the intelligence panel.

Rubio of Florida said Thursday that staff members on his presidential campaign were unsuccessfully targeted in July 2016 by hackers using an address in Russia and that former campaign aides were again targeted on Wednesday.

Ah yes, the old government-sponsored Russian hackers using "an address in Russia" to make sure they are not discovered by a cybersleuthing US senator.

In any case, while Nunes had refused to disclose who showed him the classified material, the New York Times reported on Thursday that Nunes was shown the material by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, who works at the White House Counsel’s Office and previously worked on the House Intelligence Committee staff. As reported earlier, Cohen-Watnick was an aide brought into the White House by Michael Flynn, who was fired as national security adviser in February after Trump concluded Flynn had given misleading information about contacts with Russian officials.

Nunes has said, and the Times said it confirmed, that the material isn’t related to the investigation into Russian attempts to influence the election, nor did it necessarily show any illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens.

While the House investigation has been stymied by the dispute over the material shown to Nunes, the Senate Intelligence Committee is proceeding with its own investigation. Panel Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, vowed that the probe won’t be politicized.  “The public deserves to hear the truth about possible Russian involvement in our elections,” Burr said.

In light of the events in just the past several hours, we find that rather improbable.