Two White House officials provided House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes with the information concerning intelligence reports that showed President Donald Trump and campaign associates were picked up incidentally in foreign surveillance, according to a news report.
The New York Times reported Thursday that two White House officials — Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, formerly general counsel for Rep. Devin Nunes’ House Intelligence Committee — helped provide the intelligence reports the chairman cited regarding incidental collection of Trump and his associates during what Nunes said was legal, foreign intelligence gathering.
Cohen-Watnick, who was hired by ousted National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, was reportedly a target of Flynn’s successor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster for removal from the NSC. President Donald Trump, however, overruled McMaster.
The Times said the intelligence reports “consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle in advance of his inauguration.”
Nunes has acknowledged he viewed the documents on the grounds of the White House, but he would not reveal his sources.
The news broke in between two open Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that focused on Russian disinformation tactics to disrupt the U.S. election and upcoming political campaigns in Europe.
Earlier on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin again denied Russian meddling in the 2016 election, saying, “Watch my lips: No.” The U.S. Intelligence Community has assessed that Putin ordered a cyber and influence campaign aimed at interfering in the U.S. election and boosting Trump’s chances.
While the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation appears increasingly politicized and disrupted by its chairman’s actions, the Senate committee members hosted think tank experts, academics and cybersecurity professionals to assess the history of Russian active measures, review what happened in the 2016 election, and suggest potential ways to deal with future influence and disinformation operations.
The witnesses warned that the Russian government uses a wide array of tactics to try to sow discord, dismantle democratic functions, and create fissures in the U.S., NATO, and the European Union. Among the Kremlin’s tools are online trolls, bots, distorted information, smear campaigns, financial leverage, fake news stories, and state-owned media outlets RT and Sputnik, the experts told senators at the committee’s first set of open hearings connected to its Russian interference investigation.
Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Burr said “the takeaway” should be that “we’re all targets of a sophisticated and capable adversary, and we must engage in a whole-of-government approach to combat Russian active measures.” Russian efforts “continue unabated,” he said.
The panelists and senators repeatedly raised the issue of Russian interference in upcoming elections in France, Germany, and other European countries. In the U.S., both before and after the 2016 election, Russian efforts target people from both sides of the aisle, Foreign Policy Research Institute Program on National Security’s Clint Watts noted. Putin will continue until there is an organized response against Russian interference, he said.
The panelists agreed that the U.S. needs to develop a strategic response to counter these Russian attacks. Watts said the U.S. is “weak” and does not respond to the Kremlin’s efforts, and until “we set the boundaries” about dealing with this issue, Russia will push as far as it can.
Watts also suggested that social media companies can play a role in countering Russian malfeasance. Attempting to regulate distorted or fake news stories will fail due to freedom of speech violations, he noted, but social media services could fund an independent agency, much like an “information Consumer Reports,” to provide ratings of news organizations, much like the nonprofit organization does with products and services.
Retired Gen. Keith Alexander, the CEO and President of IronNet Cybersecurity, who formerly served as the director of the National Security Agency, said the U.S. government needs clear rules of engagement and better cooperation with business. The government and the private sector need to “come up with a way of sharing threat intelligence information at network speed.” That needs to extend to U.S. allies as well, The Cipher Brief expert told Senators.
WikiLeaks, Twitter, and “overeager journalists aggressively covering political leaks” while neglecting or ignoring their provenance, act as force multipliers for fake or distorted information, King’s College London professor Thomas Rid said. Rid encouraged senators to write a letter to Twitter and other social media companies to ask for detailed data about bots to discern how much of a problem they pose.
When asked by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) why Putin thought he could get away with his effort in the U.S. in 2016, Watts replied that the answer “is very simple.”
“Part of the reason active measures have worked in this U.S. election is because the Commander-in-Chief has used Russian active measures at times against his opponents,” Watts said.
He listed several examples, such as Trump citing a fake Sputnik story in October 2016, denying U.S. intelligence findings, claiming the election could be rigged and was beset by voter fraud, and questioning former President Barack Obama’s citizenship. He also noted that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort claimed in August 2016 there was terrorist attack on Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, a fake news story Watts said had been coordinated on RT and Sputnik, then amplified by thousands of tweets.
This works in part because Trump and Russian outlets “parrot the same lines,” Watts said. He also noted that Russian bots can be observed tweeting at Trump, pushing conspiracy theories at “high volumes” when they know he’s online.
Thursday’s hearings mark the first in a series of public hearings, the Senate Intelligence committee heads said, noting they will aim to do as much in the open as possible. The House counterpart, meanwhile, has held one public hearing so far, where FBI Director James Comey confirmed the agency is conducting an investigation into whether there was any coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Nunes canceled the other House hearing scheduled for this week.
House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff, who has called on Nunes to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, said Thursday that although “no question there is a cloud over the investigation” over the way materials were provided, the inquiry is “too important” not to go forward.
The committee has devoted seven professional staff positions to its investigation, Burr said on Wednesday. The staffers, he said, have been “provided an unprecedented amount” of intelligence documents, including ones “that up to this point have only been shared with the Gang of Eight and staff directors on the House and Senate side.” The committee is “within weeks of completing the review of those documents,” he said, and is also in negotiations with the IC for access to other information.
Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Mark Warner noted during a news conference on Wednesday that the IC has for “most part, in terms of access to people, has been very cooperative.” But, he said, “on some of the documents, with some parts of the intelligence community, we still have a challenge.”
The committee has so far made 20 requests for individuals to be interviewed. Five are already scheduled. The only future interviewee the Senate has publicly released is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House advisor, who had previously undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador and the head of a Russian state-run development bank in December.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
