Devin Nunes is a patient man. The House Intelligence Committee Chairman from California knew about the subject matter of Trump’s infamous “wiretapping” tweet since January, but it was only recently that he was able to see proof of this surveillance. We are getting much closer to the source of the leaks and who unmasked private individuals. Be like Nunes. Be patient.

Slowly we are learning more about this surveillance that was conducted by the Obama administration. It appears that at least some of it was incidental to legitimate monitoring of Russian sources long before Trump’s campaign began. But the real scandal of the story is that the person responsible for exposing the names of private citizens affiliated with Trump’s team is not a lowly scofflaw or someone in the FBI.

The U.S. intelligence official who “unmasked,” or exposed, the names of multiple private citizens affiliated with the Trump team is someone “very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world,” a source told Fox News on Friday.

So who could it be? My first guess would be John Brennan, former director of the CIA.

He has lots of practice at high level surveillance and dissemination of questionable information. From Wikipedia:

His term as CIA Director coincided with revelations that the U.S. government conducted massive levels of global surveillance, that the CIA had hacked into the computers of U.S. Senate employees, and the release of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture. …. One of the controversies in his career involves the distribution of intelligence to the Bush White House that helped lead to an “Orange Terror Alert“, over Christmas 2003. The intelligence, which purported to list terror targets, was highly controversial within the CIA and was later discredited. An Obama administration official does not dispute that Brennan distributed the intelligence during the Bush era but said Brennan passed it along because that was his job.

And he’s not above using harsh tactics (maybe even unethical) to fight an enemy:

Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the first Obama administration over concerns about his support for transferring terror suspects to countries where they may be tortured while serving under President George W. Bush.

He’s not a fan of Republicans generally and he specifically does not like Donald Trump. He even voted for a communist.

In 1976, he voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall in the presidential election; he later said that he viewed it as a way “of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change.”^[16]

Donald Trump is no fan of his either.

.@FoxNews "Outgoing CIA Chief, John Brennan, blasts Pres-Elect Trump on Russia threat. Does not fully understand." Oh really, couldn't do…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2017

much worse – just look at Syria (red line), Crimea, Ukraine and the build-up of Russian nukes. Not good! Was this the leaker of Fake News?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 16, 2017

If it’s not Brennan, it’s someone just like him. Who else fits the profile?