Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, has stoutly maintained that “whistleblowers” informed him of electronic surveillance that swept in President Trump and his associates during the course of eavesdropping operations against foreign intelligence targets—and moreover that their names were not properly masked in the reports. Those facts alone, without further detail, are almost certainly classified as top secret, sensitive compartmented information. So naturally Nunes told reporters as soon as he heard.

This week it emerged that Nunes had met his whistleblowers on the grounds of the White House. That meant he left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, caught a ride to the Capitol, held a news conference, and only then drove back to the White House to deliver the ostensibly urgent news to President Trump. Today we learned definitively that the whole performance was a charade.

The intelligence chairman’s sources, according to the New York Times, were a pair of Trump appointees: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a detailee from the Defense Intelligence Agency who is senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, an assistant White House counsel for national security affairs. They are not just any presidential appointees. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently tried to fire Cohen-Watnick, a holdover selected by his predecessor, Michael Flynn, and Trump himself ordered McMaster to stand down. Ellis, the White House lawyer, used to work for Nunes on the intelligence committee.

If the Times report is accurate, there seem to be two significant breaches of the rules governing classified information. I stipulate that I am not an ideal messenger here, given my role in Ed Snowden’s NSA disclosures, and I also stipulate that news organizations are using classified leaks to track the Russia investigation. But journalists are not generally bound by secrecy regulations, and sometimes we cannot do our jobs without publishing classified facts. This case is different. Three named officials—two Trump appointees and arguably his leading defender on the Hill—appear to have engaged in precisely the behavior that the president describes as the true national security threat posed by the Russia debate. Secrecy regulations, including SF312, the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, do not permit Ellis and Cohen-Watnick to distribute sensitive compartmented information through a back channel to Nunes. This is true, and their conduct no less an offense, even though Nunes holds clearances sufficient to receive the information through proper channels. The offense, which in some cases can be prosecuted as a felony, would apply even if the White House officials showed Nunes only “tearsheet” summaries of the surveillance reports. Based on what Nunes has said in public, they appear to have showed him the more sensitive verbatim transcripts. Those are always classified as TS/SI (special intelligence) or TS/COMINT (communications intelligence), which means that they could reveal sources and methods if disclosed. That is the first apparent breach of secrecy rules. The second, of course, is the impromptu Nunes news conference. There is no unclassified way to speak in public about the identity of a target or an “incidentally collected” communicant in a surveillance operation.