MAYBE IT’S A COINCIDENCE: A Katie Walsh Timeline.
February 19, 2017. GotNews (Charles Johnson): BREAKING: @Reince’s Gal & @WhiteHouse Chief of Staff @KMWalsh_GOP Is Source Of Trump Leaks To @NYTimes & Others. [archive] “‘Everyone knows not to talk to her in the White House unless you want to see it in the press,’ says a source close to the president. ‘The only question is whether or not she’s doing it at the behest of [White House Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus [archive] or if she’s doing it to advance herself in DC media circles.’ One source in particular stands out: Walsh is close to Maggie Haberman, [archive] a New York Times reporter who wrote fawning pro-Republican National Committee stories during the presidential election. Walsh has also planted stories in The Washington Post and Politico. . . . ‘The president and his allies have been deliberately feeding her fake information in order to find her network,’ says a source close to the president’s family. ‘It’s been going well.'”
March 30, 2017. New York Times (Maggie Haberman, et al): 2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports. [archive] “Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and was previously counsel to Mr. Nunes’s committee.”
March 30, 2017. Breitbart: Shake-Up: Reince Priebus Ally Katie Walsh Out at White House. [archive] “Walsh, Politico reports and independent sources confirm to Breitbart News, will now be serving as ‘an adviser both to a pro-Trump nonprofit and the RNC.'”
March 31, 2017. Breitbart: Sources: White House Leaks at Center of Discussions for Katie Walsh Replacement. [archive] “Two sources with direct knowledge of these matters—one inside the White House and one outside—told Breitbart News on Thursday that it was Walsh’s suspected leaking that led to her removal.”
March 31, 2017. FOX News: Intelligence official who ‘unmasked’ Trump associates is ‘very high up,’ source says. [archive]
March 31, 2017. Breitbart: Fox News: Senior Obama Intelligence Official Unmasked Trump Associates. [archive] “Thursday’s mainstream media narrative was that Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis [archive] called Nunes to the White House grounds March 21, where they passed classified information to Nunes that confirmed Obama administration surveillance of the Trump camp. Then, March 22, Nunes went to the White House to present classified information to the president. . . . The Housley report [at FOX News] is that Thursday’s narrative was not true–and that Cohen-Watnick and Ellis were not sources at all; rather the two men came to the aid of Nunes, who had other sources but needed to use a Sensitive Compartmented Intelligence Facility (SCIF) that was not associated with the whistleblowers’ own agency.”
April 3, 2017. The Daily Beast: The Far Right’s Witch Hunt Inside the Trump White House. [archive] “Though [Charles] Johnson would not name his White House contact and provided no evidence to back up the ostensible anti-Walsh collaboration, he insists that the White House orchestrated a sting operation to out Walsh as a source of leaks to major media organizations and that he was enlisted as an integral part of that effort. He says the White House began feeding Walsh false information and then tasked Johnson with crawling the political web to document where that information turned up. The effort petered out, Johnson recalled, and he said he had not recently been in touch with the White House officials behind it.”