The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee made “material changes” to a secret memo he shared with lawmakers before sending it to the president to approve for final release, the top Democrat on the committee said Wednesday night.
Adam Schiff (Calif.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, called on Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to withdraw the version of the classified memo he sent to the White House on Monday, arguing that a prior vote in favor or releasing the memo was invalidated by Nunes’ changes.
The memo, drafted by Nunes’ staff, reportedly accuses the Justice Department and the FBI of abusing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the fall of 2016 to spy on Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser.
Earlier this month, members of the House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines to allow all members of the House to read the memo. Several Republicans hyped the document as evidence of a cabal of law enforcement officials determined to block President Donald Trump from entering office and to undermine his presidency. Democrats dismissed the memo as an inaccurate and misleading attempt to impugn law enforcement officials and undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Schiff, one of two members of the committee who has seen the underlying intelligence on which the memo is based, accused Nunes and Republicans who backed the memo of politicizing intelligence to protect Trump.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr...trump-adam-schiff_us_5a729a46e4b06fa61b4d57d6
Since Nunes has already been caught trying to protect Trump in the investigation, that's no surprise:
The House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation all but ran aground last week, after Nunes went to the media — and Trump — with information about the surveillance reports before informing committee Democrats.
“The biggest mistake was not consulting with the Democrats,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has previously criticized Nunes’s actions, and who applauded his decision to step down. “You have to do that if you’re going to be successful around here, especially on national security issues.”
Democrats accused Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, of coordinating the disclosure with the White House, where at least three officials were tied to the files Nunes viewed. Democrats have also accused Nunes of working with the Trump administration to keep former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying publicly before the committee.
On March 28, the heads of advocacy groups Democracy 21 and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the Office of Congressional Ethics asking investigators to look into whether Nunes disclosed classified information. It is not clear whether that letter inspired an inquiry.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powe...824bbb5d748_story.html?utm_term=.0a85f06fbdd8
The Call Was Coming From Inside the White House
A new report says that Devin Nunes’s bombshell claim of spying on the Trump team came from the Trump administration itself.
For more than a week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has provided the hottest topic for speculation in Washington: Where did he receive mysterious reports that suggested intelligence surveillance of Trump transition team officials?
Now, there appears to be an answer, courtesy of The New York Times: a pair of officials in the Trump White House. The paper reports:
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 formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.
The White House did not comment. Nunes’s spokesman reiterated that he would not identify his source.
In short, the new chronology is this: White House officials leaked intelligence information to Nunes, who then announced them last Wednesday as fresh revelations, saying that he had received them from an unnamed source and that the White House was unaware. Nunes then made a show of going to the White House to brief President Trump on revelations that had come from his staff in the first place. The administration finally used the information to claim vindication on its still-evidence-free claims that President Obama surveilled then-candidate Trump.
This runs directly counter to Nunes’s statements on March 22. Before he went to the White House, a reporter asked Nunes whether the White House should be briefing him, rather than the reverse.
“Well, the administration isn’t aware of this, so I need to make sure I go over there and tell them what I know, because it involves them,” he replied.
The revelation underscores complaints that Nunes, a California Republican and close ally of the president, is too close to the administration or is even working at its behest. It also sheds new light on a strange incident preceding the Wednesday revelation. Nunes visited a National Security Council sensitive-information room at the White House complex to view classified information, but he claimed—somewhat implausibly—that White House officials were unaware of his visit, and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has deferred questions to Nunes, saying he has no information about the visit. If the Times report is correct, it casts doubt on the truthfulness of Nunes’s story on that count, too. The chairman said his information came from an intelligence official, although Ellis is a Navy Reserve intelligence officer.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/nunes-white-house/521358/
These guys always think they're too clever to get caught. And that's always what brings them down.
"The democrats are lying!"
"The media are lying!"
"The FBI is lying!"
"The American people are lying!"
"Trump's own people are lying!"
At some point, you're going to have to make an accommodation with reality, Grosnik.
