Report: 2 White House officials helped give House Intel chair classified intelligence reports

Two White House officials helped provide intelligence documents to the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes, the New York Times reported on Thursday.

Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer who now works as a lawyer on national security issues at the White House Counsel's Office, assisted "in the disclosure of the intelligence reports" to Nunes, the Times reported.

Those reports, according to the Times, detailed the routine surveillance of ambassadors and foreign officials who had been discussing President Donald Trump and his family during the transition.

Nunes traveled to the White House last Tuesday - one day after FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Intelligence Committee that the bureau was examining the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia - to view classified executive branch documents he said had not yet been made available to members of Congress.

Nunes' office said in an earlier statement that the California congressman was investigating "the possible improper unmasking of names of US citizens" before Trump made his unfounded Twitter claim in early March that Trump Tower had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama. Nunes has said no evidence supports the president's claim.

Nunes told Bloomberg that his source was "not a White House staffer and was an intelligence official." It is unclear whether the White House officials gave Nunes the documents directly, or whether they just facilitated his entry onto White House grounds.

Nunes added that he had reached out to his "network of whistleblowers" over the past month to try to determine which kind of surveillance, if any, Trump's transition team had been under. Many cast doubt, however, on the idea that a whistleblower would meet with Nunes on White House grounds to give him classified executive-branch documents.

It is also unclear why Cohen-Watnick and Ellis, if they knew the documents existed, would not take them to the White House directly.

Nunes' office said in a statement that he will "not confirm or deny speculation about his source's identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources."