US President Donald Trump’s communications may have been swept up in intelligence gathering on suspected foreign agents, according to explosive allegations made on Wednesday by US House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes.
The Republican head of the committee — who worked on Trump’s transition team and is now leading an investigation into possible links between that campaign team and Russia — said Trump’s communications might have been intercepted late last year.
However, Nunes said there was no evidence that then-US president Barack Obama ordered the surveillance — as Trump has claimed — or that Trump was the target.
Photo: EPA
Rather, Nunes suggested, Trump’s communications were picked up during court-approved targeting of suspected foreign intelligence operatives.
The communications were not linked to Russia, he said, adding that they appeared to have “little or no intelligence value.”
“The president himself and others in the Trump transition team were clearly put into intelligence reports,” Nunes told reporters in front of the White House after briefing the president on the situation.
The information collected — spanning the November-to-January period between Trump’s election victory and his inauguration — was “widely disseminated” in US intelligence circles, he said.
US intelligence community rules dictate that information on Americans picked up incidentally in surveillance must be scrubbed or masked in intelligence reports.
Nunes suggested those involved in the surveillance had violated those rules.
As for Trump, he indicated he felt vindicated by the revelation.
“I somewhat do. I must tell you I somewhat do,” Trump said during a separate White House meeting. “I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found.”
Trump was less circumspect on Wednesday night, as he retweeted a post from conservative radio host and ardent Trump defender Bill Mitchell.
“Trump always ends up being right. It’s almost a little freaky,” Mitchell said.
On March 4, Trump implied his predecessor had broken the law in targeting him.
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” he tweeted.
The claim has snowballed into a political scandal that has called Trump’s credibility into question and damaged relations with foreign intelligence partners.
Nunes’ revelation also threatened to upend a bipartisan investigation into alleged Russian interference in the November election and Moscow’s possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, voiced anger that Nunes had taken the information to the president and the media before the committee had been consulted.
Nunes “shared this information with the White House before providing it to the committee, another profound irregularity,” Schiff said.
“I have expressed my grave concerns with the chairman that a credible investigation cannot be conducted this way,” he said.
“It certainly does not suggest — in any way — that the president was wiretapped by his predecessor,” he added.
He later told MSNBC “there is more than circumstantial evidence now” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Bradley Moss, a leading national security lawyer, said that Nunes could be in trouble because he “released what appears to be classified information.”
“Disclosure of the fact that an individual’s communications were collected, even incidentally... is a closely held classified fact. You can’t just go around spilling that information,” he said.
The lawmaker’s statement came amid revelations that one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had, more than a decade earlier, secretly worked for a Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin on a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin Government,” according to The Associated Press.
It also came days after the heads of the National Security Agency and the FBI repudiated Trump’s claims that his Trump Tower in New York had been wiretapped under Obama’s orders.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
IN PURSUIT: Israel’s defense minister said the revenge attacks by Israeli settlers would make it difficult for security forces to find those responsible for the 14-year-old’s death Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday condemned the “heinous murder” of an Israeli teenager in the occupied West Bank as attacks on Palestinian villages intensified following news of his death. After Benjamin Achimeir, 14, was reported missing near Ramallah on Friday, hundreds of Jewish settlers backed by Israeli forces raided nearby Palestinian villages, torching vehicles and homes, leaving at least one villager dead and dozens wounded. The attacks escalated in several villages on Saturday after Achimeir’s body was found near the Malachi Hashalom outpost. Agence France-Presse correspondents saw smoke rising from burned houses and fields. Mayor Amin Abu Alyah, of the