Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Fox News senior correspondent Adam Housley laid out his reporting on allegations that the then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and associates close to Trump were surveilled and that their names were unmasked at the behest of those in the Obama administration.
According to Housley, it was done at the direction of those “very high up” and was done so for “a significant amount of time,” which he described as “unprecedented” and “blockbuster.”
Transcript as follows:
We don’t know who spoke to Devin Nunes. We know it’s not someone at the White House. We don’t know who spoke to the White House about this other than what Nunes has said in front of press conferences. The sources we are talking to are separate from both of those entities. They don’t really have a horse in this game. They are frustrated with the way they say the agencies are being politicized more than they have seen before in their careers. And one reason they are speaking out is because of that. The second reason is because Nunes came out in front of the cameras and has his finger on it, they say and want to make sure it is done correctly.
What we’ve learned is this — from multiple sources is that it’s all about intelligence-gathering methods. The fact is, a lot of these men and women in the intelligence communities did not want to speak about what’s going on because they were concerned about those methods being known. But now they figure they might as well at least clarify things since Nunes has been leaked to by someone they don’t know or at least they tell me they don’t know. We know that there was this — there was surveillance of Trump and people close to Donald Trump including some supporters for up to a year before inauguration. That information was disseminated we’re told through NSA channels. It’s unprecedented the way this was done. The mention of U.S. citizens is supposed to be masked. That means basically taken out of the report.
So for example, if I call somebody in Bulgaria, and that’s picked up somehow by our agencies and there’s nothing there involving national security, there’s nothing there involving a crime, that report would come out and it would say “American number one” or my name would not be there. What I’m told now is that when these reports came out, names were there and that is unprecedented. Basically, they say the information that’s unmasking, these names of Americans who had done nothing wrong was disseminated to all of NSC, some at DoD, Clapper, Brennan — basically the people at the top.
They also say I’m told Rice knew about this possibly as well. Now, I know there are some reports out there that she was the one who ordered this. We do not know who reported this because we have not spoken to Devin Nunes about it. He has not at least told us these things. So, we don’t know what papers he saw. Our sources don’t know what papers he saw. They just tell us about the information about unmasking names from Donald Trump and his team and his family was disseminated to a very select few at the top and was done so for a significant amount of time. And that is blockbuster, guys. As far as we know hasn’t been done at least in modern times when it comes to this type of thing. Also, as we look down at some of my notes here going through this, that there were also additional unmasking as well and, again, as far as we can tell, none of this had anything to do with national security.
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