From Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker:
HOW THE WHITE HOUSE AND REPUBLICANS BLEW UP THE HOUSE RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
Last Monday morning, shortly before the start of the hearing, a senior White House official told me, Youll see the setting of the predicate. Thats the thing to watch today. He suggested that I read a piece in The Hill about incidental collection.
The article posited that if Trump or his advisors were speaking directly to foreign individuals who were the target of U.S. spying during the election campaign, and the intelligence agencies recorded Trump by accident, its plausible that those communications would have been collected and shared amongst intelligence agencies.
The White House clearly indicated to me that it knew Nunes would highlight this issue. Its backdoor surveillance where its not just incidental, its systematic, the White House official said. Watch Nunes today.
Sure enough, at last Mondays hearing, Nunes asked in his opening statement, Were the communications of officials or associates of any campaign subject to any kind of improper surveillance? He continued, The Intelligence Community has extremely strict procedures for handling information pertaining to any U.S. citizens who are subject even to incidental surveillance, and this committee wants to insure all surveillance activities have followed all relevant laws, rules, and regulations.
The best thing we have going for us right now, is the fact that the WH is staffed with Ham-handed hacks.
