Obama administration officials did not act inappropriately in trying to unmask officials on President Donald Trump's transition team whose conversations with foreign officials were incidentally collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations, Republican and Democratic congressional aides told CNN and NBC in recent days.
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Congress is poking holes in a key Trump talking point about Obama-era surveillance
Obama administration officials did not act inappropriately in trying to unmask officials on President Donald Trump's transition team, officials say.
U.S. President Donald Trump waits for the arrival of Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at the White House in Washington
Trump on classified executive-branch reports he said showed that members of the transition team had been swept up in government surveillance.
Trump, who tweeted in early March that President Barack Obama had illegally wiretapped Trump Tower phones, said afterward that he felt "somewhat vindicated" by Nunes' findings. But Nunes reiterated in multiple press conferences that there was still no evidence to suggest that Trump or his team had ever been surveilled illegally.
"The identities of US persons may be released under two circumstances: 1) the identity is needed to make sense of the intercept; 2) if a crime is involved in the conversation," said Robert Deitz, a former senior counselor to the CIA director and former general counsel at the National Security Agency.
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"Any senior official who receives the underlying intelligence may request these identities," Deitz said, noting that while "the bar for obtaining the identity is not particularly high, it must come from a senior official, and the reason cannot simply be raw curiosity."
"There is an unavoidable tension between, on one hand, restricting information to protect the privacy of US persons and, on the other hand, sharing enough information with the consumers of intelligence so that the intelligence report in question is comprehensible and useful," Pillar said in an email.
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