2 White House officials helped give Nunes intelligence reports

WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials played a role in providing Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by U.S. spy agencies.

The revelation that White House officials assisted in the disclosure of the intelligence reports — which Nunes then discussed with Trump — is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election.

Several current U.S. officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.

The officials said that earlier this month, shortly after Trump wrote on Twitter about being wiretapped on the orders of former President Barack Obama, Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.