Adam Schiff promises the House Intelligence Committee won't be distracted by Nunes drama
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday the White House will show high-ranking lawmakers on intelligence committees information discovered by the National Security Council while investigating President Trump's baseless claims that Trump Tower had been wiretapped by former President Barack Obama, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said he wants to see these materials, the sooner the better.
Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, held a press conference Thursday afternoon where he confirmed he received an invitation to see the documents, but said he had "profound concern" with how the materials were being provided. It's unclear if these materials are the same ones that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, saw last week and told Trump about during a visit to the White House, a move that caused an uproar from Democrats and Republicans alike.
"I'm in the either enviable or unenviable position of not knowing what these materials are," Schiff said. "People need to understand the process of figuring out how these were collected, whether properly collected, whether properly disseminated, properly masked or unmasked. We look at these types of issues all the time. This isn't new for our committee, which is what makes it so unusual, irregular, that it would be presented to us in that way. This is within our ordinary wheelhouse. There is a proper way to put this before the committee that certainly wasn't followed here and the White House ought to explain why it wasn't followed here."
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Despite the confusion surrounding the investigation and the fact that there is a "cloud" over the committee's probe into Russia's meddling with the presidential election, Schiff said the hoopla surrounding Nunes and his secretive trips to the White House will "not distract" them from the inquiry.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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