Intelligence panel said to find GOP leaked texts

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak of private text messages between the Senate panel’s top Democrat and a Russia-connected lawyer, according to two congressional officials briefed on the matter.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., last month to inform him of their findings. They used the meeting with Ryan to raise broader concerns about the direction of the House Intelligence Committee under its chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the officials said.

To the senators, who are overseeing what is effectively the last bipartisan investigation on Capitol Hill into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the leak was a serious breach of protocol and a partisan attack by one intelligence committee against the other.

The text messages were leaked just days after the same House Republicans had taken the extraordinary step of publicly releasing, over the objections of the FBI, a widely disputed memorandum based on sensitive government secrets. Taken together, the actions suggested a pattern of partisanship and unilateral action by the once-bipartisan House panel.

Fox News published the text messages, which were sent via a secure messaging application, in early February. President Donald Trump and other Republicans loyal to him quickly jumped on the report to try to discredit Warner, suggesting that the senator was acting surreptitiously to try to talk with the former British spy who assembled a dossier of salacious but unsubstantiated claims about connections between Trump, his associates and Russia.

“Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch,” Trump wrote at the time. “Warner did not want a ‘paper trail’ on a ‘private’ meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame.”

“All tied into Crooked Hillary,” Trump added.

The messages between Warner and Adam Waldman, a Washington lawyer, show that the senator tried for weeks to arrange a meeting with the former spy, Christopher Steele. The Senate committee has had difficulty making contact with Steele, whom it views as a key witness. And Waldman, who knew Steele, presented himself as a willing partner.

The Fox News article made prominent mention of work by Waldman’s Washington lobbying firm on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate who was once close to Paul Manafort, Trump’s indicted former campaign chairman.

Copies of the messages were originally submitted by Waldman to the Senate committee. In January, one of Nunes’ staff members requested that copies be shared with the House committee as well, according to a person familiar with the request who was not authorized to talk about it publicly. Days later, the messages were published by Fox News, the person said. Fox’s report said it had obtained the documents from a Republican source it did not name.

The documents published by Fox News appear to back up the senators’ accusation. Though they were marked “Confidential: Produced to USSSCI on a Confidential Basis,” suggesting that they had come from the Senate panel, known as the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the person familiar with the congressional requests said the stamp was misleading and that other markings gave away their actual origin.

Specifically, the copy of the messages shared with the Senate was paginated, and the one submitted to the House — while preserving the reference to the Senate committee — was unpaginated.

A lawyer for Waldman independently concluded that the House committee had probably shared the document and sent a letter to Nunes complaining about the leak, according to a person familiar with the letter.

Burr appeared to make a veiled reference to the text messages during a public hearing with the heads of the government’s intelligence agencies last month.

“There have been times where information has found its way out, some of it recent, where it didn’t come from us, but certainly people have portrayed it did,” he said. “And that’s OK, because you know and we know the security measures we’ve got in place to protect the sensitivity of that material.”

In a statement, a spokesman for Nunes, Jack Langer, did not dispute that the committee had leaked the messages, but called the premise of this article “absurd.”

“The New York Times, a prominent purveyor of leaks, is highlighting anonymous sources leaking information that accuses Republicans of leaking information,” he said. “I’m not sure if this coverage could possibly get more absurd.”

AshLee Strong, a spokesman for Ryan, declined to comment. In his meeting with the senators, Ryan made clear that he heard their complaints but noted that he did not run the committee himself, the officials briefed on the encounter said.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were briefed on their conclusions in recent weeks and on the meeting with Ryan.

In a joint statement, Burr and Warner acknowledged the meeting with Ryan and said they had not requested that the speaker take any specific action.

Waldman, the lawyer who communicated with Warner, could not be reached for comment.