“Such amazing reporting on unmasking and the crooked scheme against us by @foxandfriends,” President Donald Trump tweeted Monday. | AP Photo Trump applauds 'amazing' Fox News coverage of surveillance claim

President Donald Trump extolled Fox News early Monday morning for what he called “amazing reporting” on the “Fox and Friends” show.

“Such amazing reporting on unmasking and the crooked scheme against us by @foxandfriends,” Trump tweeted at 6:15 a.m. “’Spied on before nomination.’ The real story.”


“Fox and Friends” opened its broadcast Monday morning with host Steve Doocy highlighting the network’s “bombshell report about the unmasking of the Trump team.”

Citing a source, Malia Zimmerman and Adam Housley reported Friday that the U.S. intelligence official responsible for unmasking names of associates of Trump is someone who is “very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world.” The official, they said, is not in the FBI, which is investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, including possible collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials.

Zimmerman and Housley added that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is aware of who the official is and has known about the unmasking since January, noting that the California Republican reportedly obtained the information well before the president blasted out an unsubstantiated tweet accusing former President Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower before the election.

Intelligence officials, including FBI Director James Comey, and top lawmakers on congressional panels investigating Russia’s election interference have yet to confirm any evidence of Trump’s wiretapping claims (Trump has since suggested that by wiretapping he meant surveillance more broadly). But that didn’t stop the Fox News hosts from commending their colleagues.

“Adam Housley did an incredible job with this information,” “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said. “We heard germs of it, that it was beginning to take root during Friday’s show. But right after Friday’s show, we were able to get a perspective on basically what President Trump thought a month ago when he went out and tweeted on Saturday morning. Man, I guess on some level he saw some things that only somebody surveilling his administration would know.”

Doocy added that “what Trump was saying is turning out to be true.”

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Housley appeared on a Fox News segment to discuss his report later Monday, apparently catching the president’s eye. Citing multiple sources, Housley said “there was electronic surveillance of Trump and the people close to Donald Trump, including some supporters for up to a year before inauguration.”

“It’s unprecedented, I’m told, the way this was done,” he said.

In a tweet tagging the FBI, Trump quoted Housley: “.@FoxNews from multiple sources: ‘There was electronic surveillance of Trump, and people close to Trump. This is unprecedented.’”