President-elect Donald Trump wants to get to the bottom of news reports that revealed that intelligence agencies had intercepted chatter among Russian government officials celebrating Trump’s election. But although he was scheduled to get briefed on the matter on Friday, he doesn’t seem very interested in the intelligence itself. Instead, he wants to find out how details from an unreleased intelligence report —the results of an investigation President Obama ordered last month— made their way to the press. He tweeted Friday:
I am asking the chairs of the House and Senate committees to investigate top secret intelligence shared with NBC prior to me seeing it.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017
The president-elect wasn’t specific about the committees he was referring to, and questions to his transition team went unanswered. But it’s likely Trump was talking about the House and Senate intelligence committees, whose leaders are privy to state secrets and were briefed on the classified report on Thursday. The committees could ostensibly hold hearings or perform an investigation into the leaks.
But when Trump tweeted that he would reach out to the committees, he hadn’t yet communicated anything to their top members.
A spokesperson for Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of Trump’s own transition team, said that Nunes had “not received an official request on this yet.” Neither had Adam Schiff, the Democratic ranking member of the same committee and an outspoken Trump critic, according to a representative.