Devin Nunes Vanished the Night Before He Made Trump Surveillance Claims

The Republican intelligence chairman got a message and jumped out of an Uber. The next morning he made a bombshell claim based on classified information.

Hours before the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee announced his shocking claims about surveillance of the Trump transition team on Wednesday morning, he practically disappeared.

Rep. Devin Nunes was traveling with a senior committee staffer in an Uber on Tuesday evening when he received a communication on his phone, three committee officials and a former national security official with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. After the message, Nunes left the car abruptly, leaving his own staffer in the dark about his whereabouts.

By the next morning, Nunes hastily announced a press conference. His own aides, up to the most senior level, did not know what their boss planned to say next. Nunes’ choice to keep senior staff out of the loop was highly unusual.

The Republican chairman had a bombshell to drop.

More: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/24/devin-nunes-vanished-the-night-before-he-made-trump-surveillance-claims.html

Trump will continue to get financial reports on the Trump Organization

President Donald Trump's son Eric Trump will provide his father with financial reports regarding Trump Organization, according to a report from Forbes.

"Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that's about it," Eric Trump said despite previously echoing his father's sentiments that he will not be involved in the business during his presidency.

The younger Trump said he would issue these reports "probably quarterly," according to Forbes.

Ethics experts were concerned by this change, with Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush saying, "It just means that a lot of what they say is malarkey because the president isn't distancing himself from the business... But at the end of the day, he owns the business. He has the conflicts that come with it."

Link: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/trump-actually-will-be-involved-in-trump-organization.html

Ex-CIA Director: Mike Flynn and Turkish Officials Discussed Removal of Erdogan Foe From U.S.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, while serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign, met with top Turkish government ministers and discussed removing a Muslim cleric from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey, according to former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, who attended, and others who were briefed on the meeting.

The discussion late last summer involved ideas about how to get Fethullah Gulen, a cleric whom Turkey has accused of orchestrating last summer’s failed military coup, to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process, according to Mr. Woolsey and those who were briefed.

Mr. Woolsey told The Wall Street Journal he arrived at the meeting in New York on Sept. 19 in the middle of the discussion and found the topic startling and the actions being discussed possibly illegal.

The Turkish ministers were interested in open-ended thinking on the subject, and the ideas were raised hypothetically, said the people who were briefed. The ministers in attendance included the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country’s foreign minister, foreign-lobbying disclosure documents show.

Mr. Woolsey said the idea was “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.” The discussion, he said, didn’t include actual tactics for removing Mr. Gulen from his U.S. home. If specific plans had been discussed, Mr. Woolsey said, he would have spoken up and questioned their legality.

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ex-cia-director-mike-flynn-and-turkish-officials-discussed-removal-of-erdogan-foe-from-u-s-1490380426

How a Republican Congressman Accidentally Disclosed a Secret Intelligence Debate

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“I’m just asking a general question,” Nunes said. “Wouldn’t it be a little preposterous to say that, historically, going back to Ronald Reagan and all that we know about maybe who the Russians would prefer, that somehow the Russians prefer Republicans over Democrats?”

Watching the hearing, this seemed like a curious line of questioning. Because members of the House Intelligence Committee often know a great deal more than they can say publicly, they sometimes use their questioning to hint at what they have learned in classified settings. Nunes’s questions seemed to suggest some broader debate, as Comey confirmed when he shut down the exchange.

“I’m not going to discuss in an unclassified forum,” he said. “In the classified segment of the reporting version that we did, there is some analysis that discusses this because, remember, this did come up in our assessment on the Russian piece.”

Nunes thanked him and turned to Representative Peter King, of New York. King was less circumspect than Nunes had been. “I would just say on that because, again, we’re not going into the classified sections, that indicating that historically Russians have supported Republicans, and I know that language is there, to me puts somewhat of a cloud over the entire report,” King said.

More: http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/how-a-republican-congressman-accidentally-disclosed-a-secret-intelligence-debate?intcid=mod-latest