In an interview that aired Thursday morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) spoke with a “whistle-blower type person” before alleging that information on President Donald Trump and his associates was incidentally collected by the intelligence community.
“He had told me that — like, a whistleblower-type person had given him some information that was new that spoke to the last administration and part of this investigation,” Ryan told CBS News. “He briefs me about it, didn’t know the content of it, only knew the nature of it and that he was going to brief others.”
Ryan said he did not tell Nunes to brief Trump but that Nunes made that decision himself.
“Oh — he was gonna brief everybody. He — I already knew he was going to go and brief. So the — what Chairman Nunes said is he just came into possession of new information that he thought was valuable to this investigation, and that he was going to go and inform people about it,” the speaker said.
When CBS’ Norah O’Donnell noted that Nunes had not shared the information with other members of the committee, Ryan said that he has not seen the documents and was unsure who had the documents.
“We want this information to be provided to Congress and we’re waiting for it to be provided to Congress,” Ryan said.
