News item misses the rest of the story

The story “Trump team may appear in surveillance” in your March 23 edition was from The New York Times, but it omitted an important part of the Times’ full coverage. Your excerpt might seem to support the president’s claim that he had been “wire tapped” by President Barack Obama. The Nunes announcement as you report it contained no such actual information, only a charge that data had been collected by intelligence agencies. Incredibly, he took his finding directly to the White House, staff of which may be under investigation by his committee. In his press conferences he stated that the president’s communications were included in the collected data, but later back-tracked to say either the opposite or “maybe.”

Nunes said it was proper to inform the White House, because the monitoring he was reporting was unrelated to his committee’s investigation. Yet when asked if there should be a separate investigation, he replied that that was not necessary because his committee was already carrying out an investigation! Furthermore, Nunes broke a long standing House convention by not informing the Democratic co-chair of his investigating committee before going public.

Nunes has irretrievably compromised his committee’s work. May the Senate committee that begins its hearings on the Trump campaign Russia connections next week be carried out without this kind of bias. Given that the U.S. was attacked by a foreign adversary on the new battlefield of electronic intrusion, it is clear that we need an independent commission to undertake a thorough and impartial investigation.

This story was originally published April 11, 2017 at 6:30 PM with the headline "News item misses the rest of the story."