House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes defended himself Monday from a wave of criticism following the revelation he visited White House grounds last week to access information he said showed President Donald Trump and his associates may have had their communications collected by US intelligence during surveillance.
Nunes said on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” that he had to view the classified documents in an Executive Branch location because they intelligence community had not yet provided them to Congress.
“The Congress has not been given this information, these documents, and that’s the problem,” Nunes said. “This is Executive Branch.”
He said his sources on the matter, which he stressed was unrelated to Russia, could not deliver the documents to his committee, so he had to go to them.
“There was no way I could view that because they couldn’t get it to the House Intelligence Committee,” Nunes said.