Feinstein: WH Giving Trump Surveillance Intel to Nunes Violates ‘All of’ the Protocol for Handling Classified Information

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “MTP Daily, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) responded to a question on the New York Times’ reporting that two White House officials helped provide House Intelligence Committee Chairman Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) with information that showed President Trump was swept up in foreign surveillance and whether if the NYT report is true, it shows obstruction of justice by saying, “It certainly rises to a violation of protocol in the handling of classified information. … Classified information, there’s a whole protocol that goes along with the handling of it. This violates all of it.”

Feinstein said, “It certainly rises to a violation of protocol in the handling of classified information. This is not the way it should be done. It could have been transferred from the White House, through appropriate channels, to the House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee, and then the member, who it was to, and — would probably alert other members, and it would be available to them, in a SCIF, to read, with somebody watching you as you read it. Classified information, there’s a whole protocol that goes along with the handling of it. This violates all of it. And to have people from the NSBC, calling a member, to come up solo, and receive some information, that doesn’t go directly to the committee, that goes, I gather, to the president. Why didn’t NSC just give it to the president? I don’t quite understand what’s happening here.”

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