Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday night said that he thinks the committee will want to speak with Carter Page, a campaign aide to President Donald Trump with reported ties to Russia.
“He’s certainly a person of interest, and I think at the appropriate time, we are going to want him to come before the committee,” Schiff told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes when asked if he would like Page to testify.
Page resigned from the Trump campaign in September following a report that he met with Russian officials in private during a July 2016 trip to Moscow. Page denied the reports.
This week, Buzzfeed News reported that Page gave documents to a Russian intelligence operative in 2013. Page confirmed that he gave the official documents but claimed that the information he passed along was “immaterial.”
“I shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents with Podobny who then served as a junior attaché at the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations,” he said in a statement to ABC News.
Schiff also addressed criticism of Susan Rice from conservatives following a report that she asked for the names of Trump associates to be unmasked in intelligence reports. Experts say that Rice was in her rights to ask for the unmasking as President Obama’s national security adviser.
“What it is they have about Susan Rice that they like to go after her, I don’t know,” Schiff said on MSNBC. “This is yet another attempt to distract from the Russia probe, which they obviously want to defer and deflect as much as they can.”
Hayes asked Schiff if he’s confident that the White House will not try to interfere with the FBI’s probe into Russia’s election meddling given reports that Trump administration staffers provided House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) with intelligence reports.
“That really depends on the direction of the FBI to maintain the independence of that bureau,” Schiff replied. “One thing you can tell about this President, he is not going to change. He is who he is. So if they’re making efforts at the White House to interfere with our investigation, they’re going to continue to do that throughout the investigation. Whether they will risk doing that with the FBI, I don’t know.”
Watch the interview via MSNBC:
