Intel chair won’t reveal source on Trump team surveillance to panel’s top Dem

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told reporters Thursday that he wouldn’t reveal to the top Democrat on the panel his source behind claims that the intelligence community incidentally collected information on President Trump’s transition team.

Nunes on Wednesday that he had seen reports that suggest that agencies had collected intel on members of Trump’s transition team through routine surveillance of foreign targets. 

CNN’s Manu Raju said Thursday he was told by Nunes that despite concerns from the Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others, he would not share where he got the information.

NUNES tells me he won’t tell Schiff who gave him the intel he revealed yesterday BC he is protecting his source https://t.co/4R7EjwMCqO

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 23, 2017

Democrats have raised suspicions that Nunes’s information came from the White House, a claim press secretary Sean Spicer said doesn’t pass the “smell test.” 

“I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community collected information on U.S. individuals involved in the Trump transition,” Nunes told reporters. “Details about U.S. persons involved in the incoming administration with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reports.”

{mosads}He said that “additional names” of Trump transition officials had been unmasked in the intelligence reports and indicated that Trump’s communications may have been swept up as well.

Nunes’s decision to brief the press and the president before sharing the information with the rest of the committee drew criticism from Democrats.

Schiff said he was “blindsided” by the way Nunes handled the surveillance information, and knocked him for acting “as a surrogate for the [Trump] administration.”

“I am concerned with the fact that after our meeting when the chairman was interviewed, he wasn’t willing to rule out having received these materials from The White House itself and I don’t know what that means. This is all the more baffling by the hour,” Schiff added.