One of these days Josh Marshall is going to win some major journalism awards. He’s been doing some major dot-connecting of late.

Lauren Rozen reports tonight that Cohen-Watnick is apparently a family friend of Frank Gaffney, one of DC’s most prominent and influential Islamophobes as well as someone who is closely tied into the Bannon/Breitbart world. Rozen was also told that Cohen-Watnick was first rejected by the CIA before going to work at the DIA. These are simply shreds of biography. But they add up to a familiar picture, one that makes sense of his apparently close relationship with Flynn.

In this latest turn of events, Cohen-Watnick apparently scanned through highly classified material looking for something to justify Trump’s ridiculous wiretapping tweet. He then found a way to get that material to Devin Nunes when Nunes visited the White House in the middle of the night. Nunes then returned to the White House the next day to present the information to Trump. Again, it’s not altogether clear to me whether Nunes or Trump actually realized that the material was of little real consequence and had no bearing on Trump’s tweets. However that may be, at a minimum Cohen-Watnick was using his access to highly classified information to mount a political pushback campaign against the various Trump/Russia probes and quite likely breaking the law to do so.

But Bart Gellman, who has a very granular understanding of the modalities and rules tied to handling this kind of material, suggests an additional possibility: that Cohen-Watnick et al. had this material because they were using their privileged access to the nation’s top secrets to keep tabs on the FBI’s investigation of Trump and his top associates. Yes, read that last sentence again, I’ll wait.