Devin Nunes's Curious Trip to London [View all]

[demmiblue]

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee flew to London to gather intel on Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier alleging Trump-campaign ties with Russia. But MI5, MI6, and GCHQ didn’t seem interested.

Earlier this month, as all eyes were on the courtroom dramas unfolding in Virginia—where President Trump’s campaign chairman was just convicted on bank and tax fraud charges—and in New York, where the president’s longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and implicated Trump in a crime, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was in London, seeking out new information about former British intelligence officer and Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele.

According to two people familiar with his trip across the pond who requested anonymity to discuss the chairman’s travels, Devin Nunes, a California Republican, was investigating, among other things, Steele’s own service record and whether British authorities had known about his repeated contact with a U.S. Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. To that end, Nunes requested meetings with the heads of three different British agencies—MI5, MI6, and the Government Communications Headquarters. (Steele was an MI6 agent until a decade ago, and GCHQ, the U.K.’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, was the first foreign intelligence agency to pick up contacts between Trump associates and Russian agents in 2015, according to The Guardian.)

A U.K. security official, speaking on background, said “it is normal for UK intelligence agencies to have meetings with the chairman and members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” But those meetings did not pan out—Nunes came away meeting only with the U.K.’s deputy national security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri. The people familiar with his trip told me that officials at MI6, MI5, and GCHQ were wary of entertaining Nunes out of fear that he was “trying to stir up a controversy.” Spokespeople for Alessandri and Nunes did not return requests for comment, nor did the press offices for MI5 and MI6. GCHQ declined to comment.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/devin-nuness-curious-trip-to-london/568699/