Nune's fake scandal
By Ryan Lizza 04:51 P.M.
Recently, several members and staffers on the House Intelligence Committee .. investigating Russia’s role in the .. election, visited the National Security Agency ... Inside .. the congressmen and their aides were shown a binder of two to three dozen pages of .. classified .. transcripts of conversations between foreign government officials .. during the .. transition. These intercepts were not related to the heart of the committee’s Russia investigation. In fact, only one of the documents had anything to do with Russia ...
What the intercepts .. had in common is .. references to .. Trump or to Trump officials. That wasn’t .. clear, though, from .. the transcripts. The names of any Americans were concealed, or “masked,” the intelligence community’s term for redacting references to Americans who are not the legal targets of surveillance when .. intelligence reports are distributed to policy makers.
The binder of secret documents is at the center of .. what may be the most reckless lie .. Trump .. ever told ... “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” The White House made .. efforts to justify Trump’s claim, including using Devin Nunes .. for .. substantiation. A former Nunes staffer now working for the White House dug up the transcripts and shared them with Nunes. As Bloomberg .. reported .. Susan Rice .. had used a process that allowed her to request that the masked names be revealed to her. Rice had to log her unmasking requests on a White House computer, which is how Trump’s aides knew ... Nunes and the White House presented this as a major scandal. “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story,” Trump told the Times, adding, while offering no evidence, that Rice may have committed a crime.
... the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information .. and then leak a .. misleading characterization .. in an apparent effort to turn Rice .. into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal ... Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material .. said that the documents provided “no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal” ...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/the-continuing-fallout-from-trump-and-nuness-fake-scandal
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