Gregory Korte

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The White House says it has discovered documents that may show that intelligence collected on Americans was "mishandled and leaked," hinting that the documents may substantiate President Trump's allegation that he was the target of surveillance by the Obama administration.

The revelation of the documents came immediately after the New York Times reported that House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had secretly received similar information from two White House officials last week.

That's when Nunes announced he had seen classified documents confirming that intelligence agencies "incidentally" collected information on U.S. citizens involved in Trump's presidential transition, presenting the information as independent corroboration of Trump's claims that he was caught up in surveillance. Nunes then made a high-profile visit to the Oval Office to share what may have been the White House's own information with the president himself.

In a letter to the House Intelligence Committee Thursday, White House Counsel Don McGahn said the National Security Council had discovered documents related to mishandling of classified information, one of many areas congressional committees are examining as part of their sprawling investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.

McGahn said the documents were discovered "in the ordinary course of business," and offered to share them with Nunes and Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee.

Schiff said the manner and the timing of the offer raises questions about whether the White House was trying to create a distraction from the Russia investigation. He asked: Why didn't the National Security Council — which reports to the president — not share the documents directly with the president, rather than have a congressman do it?

"If that was designed to hide the origin of the materials, that raises profound questions about just what the White House is doing that need to be answered," he said.

The Times, citing anonymous sources, said the officials who shared the classified reports with Nunes were Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis. Cohen-Watnick is the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council; Ellis works in the White House counsel's office on national security issues. Both work in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where Nunes said he had reviewed the reports the day before sharing what he learned with Trump.

Neither the White House nor the intelligence committee would confirm the New York Times report. "In order to comment on that story would be to validate things that I'm not at liberty to do," White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.

Independent probe?

A spokesman for Nunes also would not confirm the sources of the chairman's information. "As he’s stated many times, Chairman Nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources," said Jack Langer, communications director for the House Intelligence Committee.

If true, the report further calls into question the independence of the House investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign. And it would add a new wrinkle to the intrigue over President Trump's as-yet-unsubstantiated allegation that President Barack Obama had ordered wiretapping on Trump Tower last year.

So far, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has the power to remove Nunes as committee chairman, said he supports keeping Nunes at the top of the House Intelligence Committee. "The speaker doesn't know the source of the disclosure to Chairman Nunes," Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said. "I'd refer you to the committee for more. As the speaker said this morning, the chairman has his full confidence."

Meanwhile, there are two parallel investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election — one by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which conducted a hearing Thursday, and the FBI. The bureau's probe started last July, FBI Director James Comey said last week.

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Spicer said Thursday that the White House is cooperating with the congressional investigations. "I don’t want to get in front of that," he said. "We are not as obsessed with the process as much as the substance."

But in his letter to the committee, McGahn suggested additional questions the White House wants Congress to look at, including whether U.S. citizens who were subject to surveillance had their civil liberties violated.

"Was the intelligence contained in these documents properly gathered?" he asked. "Was there any improper unmasking or distribution of intelligence?"

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies may freely eavesdrop on non-U.S. persons while they are outside the United States. But if those discussions are about Americans, that information must be "minimized" and the identities of those people masked in any intelligence reports in order to protect their privacy.

Nunes has said the documents he's seen suggest that intelligence agencies failed to do that masking with members of the Trump transition team.

Trump started the controversy over wiretapping by the Obama administration with a series of tweets on the morning of Saturday, March 4. He claimed Obama personally had him wiretapped, an illegal move that would violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Neither Trump nor his staff has provided any proof that this happened, and Comey told Nunes' committee last week that there is no evidence of any wiretaps.

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