Politicization of intel by the Trump admin is a major scandal- cover-up, collusion, and interference
...it's also a dangerous new policy aim of the Trump WH.
NYT reported this week that two WH officials, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael J. Ellis, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, fed Nunes intelligence from a database accessible from the WH.
There's every reason to believe these officials were rifling through the files to find something that would cover for Trump's 'wiretap' lie. They didn't just happen upon the intelligence reports. They were looking for something, at the direction of Nunes, or the direction of the WH.
The question now is who ordered or gave authorization to this green, political plant (who was placed in that NSA position by the ousted Gen. Flynn) to scan those files. More importantly, there's a question of whether the WH was attempting to monitor the FBI investigation of Trump and associates.
emptywheel looks at this:
...in 2002, Jay Bybee wrote a memo authorizing the sharing of grand jury information with the President and his close advisors including for counterintelligence investigations.In addition, the Patriot Act recently amended 6(e) and Title III specifically to provide that matters involving foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or foreign intelligence information may be disclosed by any attorney for the government (and in the case of Title III, also by an investigative or law enforcement officer) to certain federal officials in order to assist those officials in carrying out their duties. Federal officials who are included within these provisions may include, for example, the President, attorneys within the White House Counsel’s Office, the President’s Chief of Staff, the National Security Advisor, and officials within the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense.
{snip}
Although the new provision in Rule 6(e) permitting disclosure also requires that any disclosures be reported to the district court responsible for supervising the grand jury, we conclude that disclosures made to the President fall outside the scope of the reporting requirement contained in that amendment, as do related subsequent disclosures made to other officials on the President’s behalf.
In other words, Trump could demand that he — or his National Security Advisor! — get information on any grand jury investigations, including those covering counterintelligence cases. And no judge would be given notice of that." (read the rest of her essay)
Nunes' shifting, almost bewildered explanation of the contents of what he claimed to have seen in the reports is likely because of the 'raw' nature of much of the intel in those databases. Nunes doesn't look to have any idea what he was looking at. He really didn't need to know, just spin the lines his WH handlers had fed him, but it's significant that someone who would be in a position to know, seasoned prosecutor Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House Intelligence committee opposite Nunes, viewed what the WH claimed was the same info and concluded that it did not merit all of the chairman's hype and alarm.
All of the orchestration, coordination, and subsequent politicization of these intelligence reports highlights an aim of Trump which the WH rolled out this week: Apparently the WH wants to be fed 'raw' uncritical data from intelligence reports, instead of analyzed intel.
AP:
Officials have expressed an interest in having more raw intelligence sent to the president for his daily briefings instead of an analysis of information compiled by the agencies, according to current and former U.S. officials. The change would have given his White House advisers more control about the assessments given to him and sidelined some of the conclusions made by intelligence professionals.
One official said the focus on accessing more raw intelligence appeared to be more of a priority under the short tenure of Michael Flynn, who was ousted as national security adviser after less than one month on the job. He was replaced by H.R. McMaster, an Army lieutenant general who was expected to exert more control over the NSC but has found himself struggling to overcome skepticism among Flynn holdovers who have the ear of Bannon.
It's clear that Trump is willing and eager to use our national intelligence agencies as a rumor mill for his petty political purposes. What's more ominous is his administration's apparent willingness to use their role in accessing that intelligence to cover their political and legal hides.
At the very least, this should give pause to any notion this WH would tread carefully in the midst of an investigation of their own conduct. There's much, much more concern about their stewardship of our government agencies' intel, with regard to the very attempts by law enforcement to protect the integrity of our communications and covert investigations.
And there's the very prescient question of how we're to trust the president or his administration's conclusions, based on their own interpretation of intelligence data. Taking seasoned, experienced, experts out of the decision-making process is an invitation for a major blunder for a president who knows even less about foreign policy than he knows how to manage his own personal affairs.
Something urgently needs to be done to protect the integrity of our intelligence services. In short, we've got Russia hacking into our government, and officials in the Trump WH are behaving like KGB moles.
= new reply since forum marked as read
i.e., removing the redaction of the names in a report...
The concern I have at this point is the fact that you now have not only novice but nefarious actors in the WH rifling around top secret data and then playing fast and loose with releasing that info in caged language, which in turn could not only kill any future potential prosecution of wrong-doers, but could make this country even more vulnerable to attack. 
Perhaps there are some in the IC who would just assume feed them somewhat "plausible" but essentially fake stuff at this point in order to protect the integrity of this nation's sovereignty.
