• Carlos the Jackal, the notorious Marxist terrorist, has just received his third life sentence in France. If he is getting bored with those, the United States does offer an exciting alternative.
• The chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, FBI director James Comey, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes are all in agreement: Donald Trump’s accusation that his predecessor ordered the “wiretapping” of Trump Tower in the final weeks of the presidential campaign was baseless. Nunes provided a twist in this convoluted saga, though, when he informed reporters that there is reason to believe that the intelligence community “incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition”; that some of that information was “widely disseminated” inside the executive branch even though it had no foreign-intelligence value; and that certain individuals’ identities were revealed (“unmasked”), potentially in violation of intelligence protocols. If Nunes’s information is accurate, it is deeply troubling. Unfortunately, its importance has been overshadowed by Nunes’s foolish decision to disclose his news to the White House before he disclosed it to his own committee, and by his evasiveness about where he is getting his information. We have repeatedly encouraged the congressional intelligence committees to conduct a thorough and, to the extent possible, transparent investigation of the various allegations tying the Trump campaign to Russia, and into the leaks that have fueled those allegations. If those committees are not up to the task, Congress ought to form a select committee. The president’s reckless accusation may have been discredited, but important questions clearly remain, and there’s no excuse for not getting to the bottom of them.
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