When The New York Times reported Thursday that two White House officials had shown House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) the classified reports he cited when publicly alleging that President Trump's transition team communications had been incidentally collected during foreign surveillance, Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake took special note. Earlier in the week, Lake said, Nunes had "told me that his source for that information was an intelligence official, not a White House staffer. It turns out, he misled me."
Nunes was reportedly fed the classified intelligence by two Trump political appointees: National Security Council senior intelligence director Ezra Cohen-Watnick, whom Trump stopped National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster from firing, and White House national security lawyer Michael Ellis, who used to work for Nunes in the House. This revelation "is a body blow for Nunes, who presented his findings last week as if they were surprising to the White House," Lake writes. "It strains credulity to think that Trump would need Nunes to tell him about intelligence reports discovered by people who work in the White House."
But the real "tragedy" here, Lake says, is that "incidental collection" of U.S. citizens' communications is a real concern and has been since Edward Snowden's leaked NSA documents were revealed. Congress shouldn't vote to reauthorize the surveillance laws in the fall, he argues, but "sadly, the merits of this case are undermined by how the White House and Nunes have made it."
Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who helped reveal the Snowden leaks, disagrees with Lake about the real story. "This is far more than a story of intelligence manipulation for political gain," he writes at The Century Foundation. Cohen-Watnick and Ellis almost certainly showed Nunes classified information he wasn't even supposed to see, suggesting all three "engaged in precisely the behavior that the president describes as the true national security threat posed by the Russia debate." And from all available evidence, they — not intelligence agencies — requested that the names in the top secret intelligence be "unmasked," he said.
The biggest, most serious question, Gellman says, is this: "Why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? ... Were the president's men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?" You can read Gellman's full argument at The Century Foundation. Peter Weber
On Monday night, Senate Republicans released a 1,300-page version of the plan President Trump outlined Saturday to reopen the federal government. It includes $5.7 billion for Trump's border wall, a three-year extension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for DREAMers, and bills to fund the parts of the government closed for 31 days and counting, plus $12.7 billion in assorted disaster and agricultural relief. Immigration experts also found several big, unheralded changes to the U.S. immigration system.
Democrats have already rejected the bill, and the details probably won't help win any over when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) brings it up for a vote this week.
The first big change deals with asylum. Notably, "it makes it so Central American minors are ineligible for asylum if they don't apply at a processing center (to be established) in Central America," says The Federalist's Gabriel Malor. "Asylum is a form of relief for people who are being persecuted in their home countries and the authorities there are unable or unwilling to protect them (or are the source of the persecution). You can't condition asylum on people remaining in the place where they are persecuted."
Also, immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick notes, "only 50k Central American minors [would be] allowed to apply for asylum each year, and only 15k asylum applications can be granted," by Homeland Security Department officials (not judges) through "a kangaroo process." The bill would not extend Temporary Protected Status for all 300,000 immigrants from war-torn or disaster-struck countries, just some from Central America and Haiti.
The ban on Central American minors "is pretty bad and reason alone to oppose this bill," Malor argues. "But the changes to whether an application can be found to be frivolous applies to ALL applicants, and it's completely unreasonable." The bill "will (and should) get zero votes from Democrats," he adds, "and to be honest, Republicans should be shooting question marks at McConnell, too." Peter Weber
Attempting to clarify conflicting statements he gave about a Trump Tower project in Moscow, Rudy Giuliani managed to make an already confusing situation even more baffling.
President Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was in charge of the Moscow project. On Sunday, Giuliani — Trump's current lawyer — said project discussions were held as late as October or November 2016, almost to Election Day. On Monday, Giuliani released a statement saying his remarks were "hypothetical and not based on conversations I had with the president."
Late Monday, The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner called Giuliani to discuss his shifting story. First, they discussed the BuzzFeed News report last week that Trump directed Cohen to lie about when the Moscow negotiations ended, as Cohen did. Giuliani said he knew the story was false because "I have been through all the tapes, I have been through all the texts, I have been through all the emails, and I knew none existed."
Wait, what tapes? Chotiner asked. "I shouldn't have said tapes," Giuliani said, backtracking. "They alleged there were texts and emails that corroborated that Cohen was saying the president told him to lie. There were no texts, there were no emails, and the president never told him to lie." Moving on, Giuliani said Trump "had no conversations" about the Moscow project, before reversing course and declaring, "I shouldn't say he had no conversations. He had a few conversations about this early-stage proposal that he ended somewhere in early 2016, and doesn't have a recollection of anything else, and there is nothing to support anything else."
Giuliani denied telling The New York Times that Trump said "discussions were going on from the day I announced to the day I won," but when asked if the Times made the quote up, Giuliani said he didn't know. None of this matters anyway, Giuliani said, because "even if it's true, it's not criminal." Read the entire bewildering interview at The New Yorker. Catherine Garcia
