Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said on Sunday that House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has left the panel “in the dark” amid President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of surveillance.
“We can’t have a credible investigation if one of the members, indeed the chairman, takes all the information he has seen to the White House and doesn’t share it with his own committee,” Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I don’t think he’s shared it with anyone on the committee, so we’re all quite in the dark on this.”
Nunes on Wednesday bypassed his own committee to tell both the press and the White House that he had seen reports showing that information about President Donald Trump and his staffers was “incidentally collected” during the transition.
Schiff released a statement calling Nunes’ actions a “profound irregularity” and later told reporters that Nunes had acted like a “surrogate of the White House.”
On Friday, he charged Nunes with canceling an open hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 election in an “attempt to choke off public info.”
“We, I think, suffered really two serious blows to the integrity of the investigation this week,” Schiff said on Sunday. “I think the chairman has to make a decision, whether to act as a surrogate of the White House as he did during the campaign and the transition, or to lead an independent and credible investigation. I hope he chooses the latter.”
.@RepAdamSchiff: “We’re all quite in the dark on this” on House Intel investigations pic.twitter.com/ePatAHfm69
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) March 26, 2017
Well, in fairness to Nunes, based on his later comments, he left himself in the dark, too, saying that he hadn’t seen some of the documents he was talking about and walking back the claims. So it’s all good.
Schiff gave the Democratic response to the so called president’s weekly address.
Everything Nunes has done of late just stinks. Very fishy.
And Schiff, the ex-prosecutor-of-Russian-spies, knows exactly how to play the statements game in a fashion that isolates Nunes even more every minute that Nunes fails to explain. Schiff is playing this like a master. Glad he’s on the side of the angels!
If it looks like collusion, walks like collusion, talks like collusion, and smells like collusion, then it probably is collusion. More to the point, it starts to smell like treason. This whole matter demands an independent prosecutor and a neutral investigative commission.