Well, we now have word on Devin Nunes’s White House sources:
A pair of White House officials played a role in providing Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
The Chair of the House Intel Committee went to the White House to get super secret intel that he couldn't share with his own committee before making public to try to take the heat off the White House for the whole Russia thing, and then the White House Minister of Disinformation did his failing best to lie about it.
This is all perfectly normal. For the Trump era, anyway. Nunes also couldn't share his source with his own committee. Which is also perfectly normal. For the Trump era, anyway.
And we now have actual names.
Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.
And news from a couple weeks ago is where it gets really interesting:
President Donald Trump has overruled a decision by his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, to sideline a key intelligence operative who fell out of favor with some at the Central Intelligence Agency, two sources told POLITICO.
On Friday, McMaster told the National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence programs, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, that he would be moved to another position in the organization.
The conversation followed weeks of pressure from career officials at the CIA who had expressed reservations about the 30-year-old intelligence operative and pushed for his ouster.
But Cohen-Watnick appealed McMaster’s decision to two influential allies with whom he had forged a relationship while working on Trump’s transition team — White House advisers Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. They brought the matter to Trump on Sunday, and the president agreed that Cohen-Watnick should remain as the NSC’s intelligence director, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.
Bannon and Kushner. The extremist propagandist and the utterly unqualified son-in-law who are more or less running the country right now going over the head of the three-star general who heads the NSA to keep on staff the guy brought in by the guy who was forced to resign for lying about his meetings with Putin people, among other things. Which is also perfectly normal. For the Trump era, anyway.
And the other source?
The House Intel Committee is broken. Which certainly is Making America Great Again.