Discord threatens House Russia probe
WASHINGTON — A week that began with a public hearing by the House Intelligence Committee that confirmed the FBI is conducting a counterintelligence investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russia ended Friday with “deeply disturbing signs” that a House probe into the same topic is breaking apart.
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chairman of the committee, announced Friday that he had postponed what was to have been another public hearing on Tuesday, a decision that was angrily denounced moments later by Rep. Adam Schiff, the Californian who is the highestranking Democrat on the committee. Schiff pointedly
called the postponement a cancellation.
Nunes had said the committee needed more time so its members could hear in closed session more testimony from FBI Director James Comey and his National Security Agency counterpart, Adm. Mike Rogers. The two had said Monday that they could not answer some 50 questions in public, and Nunes said the committee needs those answers “before we can move forward.”
Among the questions were any details of investigations ordered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the names of anyone allegedly linked to the case, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who served in the Trump administration for 24 days before he was fired for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador.
But Schiff accused Nunes of canceling the hearing, which was to have heard from Obama administration officials — Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates — to “choke off public information” and avoid any more embarrassment to the White House.
Questions on Manafort
“I don’t think that anyone should have any doubt about what is really going on here,” Schiff said. “The point was to cancel a public hearing.”
Comey and Rogers also declined to respond to questions about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was fired in August when it was learned he was under investigation for possibly accepting $12 million from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine, and Roger Stone, a one-time Trump campaign adviser who has acknowledged contacts with WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 over pirated Democratic party emails.
Nunes said Friday that Manafort had agreed to testify. Trump adviser Carter Page and Stone volunteered to speak to the committee as well.
Nunes told reporters outside the committee’s “no visitors allowed” chambers that the cancellation of Tuesday’s hearing was a scheduling matter. But Schiff used the same location to say he believed Nunes was acting at the bidding of the White House.
Their competing views were just the latest sign that the pledge that Congress could undertake an independent probe into Russian election meddling through its already existing committees is in deep trouble.
Explosive, confusing
That has been obvious since Wednesday, when Nunes announced that he had become privy to documents that showed that Trump and his associates had been the subject of what is known in counterintelligence as “incidental collection” — a term employed to describe Americans whose names turn up in the communications of foreigners being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Nunes said the surveillance appeared to have been legal, authorized by the nation’s secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But in the context of the past month, when Trump accused President Barack Obama of having ordered that he be wiretapped, only to have that accusation rejected by congressional leaders and then, on Monday, Comey and Rogers, the revelation was explosive, if confusing.
“For the most part, the reports have value for intelligence,” Nunes said. “But there are some questions, some information in the documents that I don’t think belongs there.”
Schiff, who by Friday still had not seen the material, described the focus of those reports as intelligence on “foreign spies.” He characterized the way in which Nunes, and no one else on the committee, had gained access to the documents as a “dead of night” trip — he didn’t say to where — to view the documents.