Good Lord
/The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that information on the Trump campaign — including Donald Trump himself — was “incidentally collected” by the intelligence community during the Obama administration.
“I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions the intelligence community incidentally collected information about US citizens involved in the Trump transition,” Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said at a press conference on Capitol Hill.
“Details about US persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value, were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting,” he added.
The high-ranking Republican congressman called the effort both “normal” and “alarming.”
“This is a normal, incidental collection, based on what I could collect,” he said. “This appears to be all legally collected foreign intelligence [under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act].”
He also said, “I’m actually alarmed by it. … Details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in an intelligence community report.”
Nunes insisted that “None of this surveillance was related to Russia.”
Illegal and a true danger to the country. Just this morning the WSJ editorialized that Trump was "clinging to his wiretap theory like a drunk to his gin bottle". Will they now change their tune?
You'd think a Senator of the United States would find that outrageous, rather than something to boast about. In fact, that's scarier than the revelation that our intelligence agencies and the IRS have targeted opponents of their fiefdoms; we kind of knew that, but the lack of resistance to those agencies by our highest elected officials is a really, really bad thing.
UPDATE: No change at the Wall Street Journal - it's reporting it as just another Trump machination and stresses that the interceptions were legal, while making no reference whatsoever to the real crime here, the leaking of those intercepts.
