Security analyst schools O'Reilly: There IS a scandal, WH officials likely "under serious investigation"

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly conducted a segment that probably did not go quite the way he expected it to. After laying out the chain of events that led House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) to privately brief Donald Trump on information that Trump’s White House had leaked to Nunes, O’Reilly asked Fox News security expert Col. Ralph Peters if there is some sort of scandal there that O’Reilly is just not seeing.

Not only did Peters say there definitely is a scandal, he literally called “BS” on O’Reilly’s attempt to shift the focus to Trump’s surveillance talking points, and made a devastating observation:

O’REILLY: Is there a scandal here or is there anything here that you are seeing as our security expert, that I am not seeing?

PETERS: There is a sort of scandal in the fact that this wasn’t the National Security Council sourcing these documents. It was a couple of Trump appointees assigned to the National Security Council. This wasn’t H.R. McMaster. It was clearly another attempt to divert attention from the main issue, which is the question of whether or not Vladimir Putin’s regime was able to penetrate the Trump campaign, and potentially the administration.

O’REILLY: We’ll get that into a minute though.

PETERS: But that’s what it’s about.

O’REILLY: It’s important if Donald Trump and some high member of his transition team are caught on wiretaps, as you know, it is supposed to be blanked out, now there are on transcripts in the intel agencies. I think that is an important story, is it not?

PETERS: No, I think it is a BS story, and it is phony, and no one will release those. I will tell you, unlike so many of the instant pundits out there, I actually worked in the intelligence world for over two decades. We take great care not to include the names of U.S. citizens unless they are under some sort of serious investigation. So if those names were not blacked out in the transcripts, that tells me that these people were under serious investigation, perhaps part of the FBI investigation.

What Peters is identifying speaks not only to the corruption and dishonesty of the Trump administration, but also its deep incompetence. These documents were leaked in order to cover for Trump, but if what Peters says is true, the documents have instead confirmed that Trump associates are under “serious investigation” by our intelligence agencies. If the Trump administration continues to “help” itself this way, Michael Flynn will not be the only one looking to cut a deal.