Remember when Nunes and this administration were so concerned about "unmasking"?

But what happens when the intentional outing of U.S. intelligence assets is the province not of rogue insiders, not of foreign hackers or foreign agents, not of people who end up spending the rest of their lives as fugitives, but of senior officials in two branches of this country’s government who are most responsible for protecting those assets? To wit, what happens when the Chairman of the House intelligence committee and the President of the United States team up to out an FBI informant over the strenuous objection of the bureau and the Department of Justice—and manage to get the job done? And what happens when they do so for frankly political reasons: to protect the president from a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation involving the activity of an adversary foreign power?

These questions should be the stuff of conspiratorial Hollywood movies. They are, in fact, the stuff of this week’s news.

On Friday evening, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that an American professor in the United Kingdom had acted as a source for the FBI during the early stages of the bureau’s investigation of L’Affaire Russe. The professor, whom both outlets reported had provided information to both the FBI and CIA, met with George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Sam Clovis, had also had interacted in the past with Michael Flynn. His reported contacts with the campaign began shortly before the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation on the basis of Papadopoulos’s comments to an Australian diplomat, when he interacted with Page following the campaign advisor’s visit to Moscow in July 2016. The source reportedly continued to talk to Page, Papadopoulos and Clovis through the late summer and fall of that year.