Trump’s communications may have been captured by ‘normal’ surveillance

RELATED: Congressman Turner hints intelligence agencies may have spied on Trump

Nunes did not say where he got the intelligence reports but characterized them as including “essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.”

He said he believed the information had been legally collected but questioned whether the identity of the U.S. citizens involved in the legally-surveilled information was properly “masked.”

The California Republican said none of the surveillance was related to criminal investigations.

Nunes said the information had “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value,” but was nonetheless “widely disseminated” in intelligence community reporting.

His comments appear to give some credence to Trump’s previously debunked Twitter allegations that former President Barack Obama “wiretapped” him.

And Trump himself said Wednesday he was “somewhat vindicated” by the reports.

But House Intelligence Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff said yhe information “certainly does not suggest — in any way — that the President was wiretapped by his predecessor.”

Schiff said he had not heard about the intercepts before Nunes briefed the press and the White House.

“If the information was lawfully gathered intelligence on foreign officials, that would mean that U.S. persons would not have been the subject of surveillance,” he said, adding that Nunes told him most of the names on the intercepts remained masked “but he could still figure out the probable identity of the parties.”

“Again, this does not indicate that there was any flaw in the procedures followed by the intelligence agencies,” he said. “Moreover, the unmasking of a U.S. person’s name is fully appropriate when it is necessary to understand the context of collected foreign intelligence information.”

At a Tuesday hearing of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence, National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers and FBI Director James Comey both said they hadn’t seen any evidence that Obama had wiretapped Trump, and Comey said Obama would’ve needed a court order to do so.

But Trump’s initial allegations — made in early March — were that Obama himself had “wiretapped” his conversations before the November election.

Nunes said that the information he has involved conversations in November, December and January — all during the transition period to the new presidency. And Nunes said Obama had not directly “wiretapped” Trump, as Trump had alleged, but that the conversations were picked up because of monitoring of the foreign countries involved in the conversations.

Still, he said, the names of U.S. citizens whose conversations were picked up should not have been released.

Nunes’ comments come after Turner, R-Dayton, asked Rogers and Comey Monday whether it was possible that the intelligence community picked up Trump’s conversations because of their surveillance of others during a rare open hearing of the House Intelligence Committee.

“The reason why this is important is because intuitively we would all know the incoming administration would have conversations with those that the intelligence community may be collecting against either by making phone calls to them or receiving phone calls from them,” Turner said.

In an interview Monday, Turner said he had been concerned for some time about whether or not conversations picked up “incidentally” through surveillance of other countries involved the “unmasking” of U.S. citizens involved in those conversations. He said the law allowing surveillance of foreign countries acknowledges that private conversations of private U.S. citizens will “inevitably” be intercepted.

“The question is what happens next,” he said.

Nunes briefed both House Speaker Paul Ryan and Trump about what he’d learned, and said he had requested additional information on the information from the FBI, CIA and NSA. After that meeting, Trump told CNN that he felt “somewhat” vindicated by Nunes’ information.

Nunes said none of the surveillance he’d learned about “was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities.”

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