CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on Thursday suggested that new revelations from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that associates of President Trump’s transition team were surveilled and “unmasked” by the Obama administration were irrelevant to ongoing investigations into Trump’s claims that he had his “wires tapped.”
Cuomo used a Thursday morning interview to focus on the process Nunes used to make the new information public, instead of the main news that the Obama administration may have improperly uncovered Trump transition officials picked up in routine surveillance. Nunes delivered a public statement and press conference after he said he had briefed Trump, and Cuomo suggested Nunes’ tactics ran afoul of normal procedures.
“Have you ever heard of the chair of an independent committee doing what Nunes just did: getting some information that wasn’t necessarily new but was certainly helpful to the White House, going around the committee, going to the press and going to the White House?” Cuomo said to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.
Rep. @Jim_Jordan: Chairman @DevinNunes still capable of leading independent probe despite communications with Trumphttps://t.co/qWoi4KUW8t
— New Day (@NewDay) March 23, 2017
In a separate interview with Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, Cuomo again dismissed Nunes’ findings and instead homed in on questions about why he did something that would “help” Trump.
“Devin Nunes, he gets some intel that you could argue isn’t revelatory and maybe not even new, but what he did was new and perhaps revelatory,” Cuomo said. “He goes to the White House, skips over his own committee co-chair and the members and basically tries to help the White House spin its own narrative about what wiretapping means. Do you believe that he can lead what’s supposed to be an independent investigation after that move?”
Cuomo’s questions suggested that Nunes’ conduct was dishonest and was done for the sole purpose of covering Trump’s so-far unsubstantiated claim earlier this month that former President Obama ordered direct surveillance on him.
The White House has since obscured Trump’s initial claim about wire tapping and said it believed that there was some type of surveillance conducted by the intelligence community.
During a press conference Wednesday, Nunes said he had seen evidence to corroborate the claim of directly “wiretapping.” Still, he said the possibility of improper unmasking was a real problem.
At the heart of Nunes’ concerns was newly-uncovered evidence that several members of the Trump transition team — and possibly the president himself — had their communications swept up through “incidental collection” and subsequently had their identities revealed in intelligence reports that were disseminated throughout the government.
“What I have read bothers me and I think it should bother the president himself and his team, because I think some of it seems to be inappropriate,” Nunes told reporters at the White House following his meeting with Trump.
