Top House Investigator Devin Nunes: Feds Surveilled Trump Transition Team

WASHINGTON, DC — Rep. Devin Nunes said Wednesday that the intelligence community legally surveilled Donald Trump's transition team, and possibly Trump himself, during the weeks between the 2016 election and the president's inauguration.

Nunes — chairman of he House Intelligence Committee investigating Russian attempts to influence the election and whether Trump's campaign staff was involved — said the newly revealed information was central to the House inquiry he had promised to lead without favor to the president.

That promise was apparently deemed no longer operable. Rather than providing the information to his investigative committee, Nunes instead rushed to share the information with the White House he is investigating.

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Nunes' decision was unusual, to say the least, and added another layer of confusion — or distraction —from the committee's investigations, which was expanded to include allegations by Trump that former President Obama had ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower.

“I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found,” the president told reporters at the White House, apparently referring to the leakers of the documents. Trump said he felt vindicated, up to a point. “I somewhat do,” he said.

Nunes, though, said the information did not include any evidence to support Trump's allegations against Obama. Further, the chairman said that the surveillance was legal and that Trump staffers were “incidentally” swept up by American spy agencies engaged in routine surveillance of foreign officials..

"I believe it was all done legally," Nunes said. But he questioned whether it was morally right and whether the public would approve. He also was worried that the identities certain people involved in the conversations were unjustly revealed, he said. Most names remained masked, he said, but he was able to identify them.

Apparently discarding another promise — to hunt down and jail anybody responsible for intelligence leaks related to the investigation — he would not disclose who provided the information.

The ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said Nunes needs to decide whether he wants to be chairman of a committee that is supposed to investigate without partisanship or work as a Trump surrogate.

"It appears that committee members only learned about this when the Chairman discussed the matter this afternoon with the press," Schiff said. "The Chairman also shared this information with the White House before providing it to the committee, another profound irregularity, given that the matter is currently under investigation. I have expressed my grave concerns with the Chairman that a credible investigation cannot be conducted this way."

He continued: "The Chairman informed me that most of the names in the intercepted communications were in fact masked, but that he could still figure out the probable identity of the parties.... This does not indicate that there was any flaw in the procedures followed by the intelligence agencies. Moreover, the unmasking of a U.S. Person's name is fully appropriate when it is necessary to understand the context of collected foreign intelligence information."

Nunes noted that he planned to discuss the matter with FBI Director James Comey on Friday.

Schiff said that the information Nunes provided "does not suggest -- in any way -- that the President was wiretapped by his predecessor."

Democrats said Nunes had badly damaged his credibility by rushing to share his claims with the White House and raised questions about the independence and viability of the House inquiry he is leading.

New York Times national security and intelligence reporter Matthew Rosenberg said of the press conference:

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