White House defends lawmaker’s decision to brief Trump

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The White House on Thursday defended the House intelligence committee chairman’s extraordinary decision to openly discuss and brief President Donald Trump on typically secret intelligence intercepts, even as Rep. Devin Nunes privately apologized to his congressional colleagues.

The decision to disclose the information before talking to committee members outraged Democrats and raised questions about the independence of the panel’s probe of Russian interference in the election.

“It was a judgment call on my part,” Nunes told reporters shortly after the closed-door committee meeting. “Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the wrong decision.”

Frustrated Democrats questioned whether Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, was working in coordination with the White House, a charge the White House disputed.

Still, White House spokesman Sean Spicer claimed, inaccurately, that Nunes was “vindicating” the president’s unproven assertion that President Barack Obama wiretapped his New York skyscraper during the election. Nunes specifically stated that the new information he received did not support the president’s explosive allegations.