Democratic Representative Adam Schiff held a brief press conference Thursday afternoon. The conference was in response to the letter sent out by the White House inviting the leadership of both the House and Senate intelligence committees to come and view “materials” that the White House feels are relevant to investigations of “unmasking.”
Schiff said that he had sent the White House a reply, agreeing that he would come to view the materials and said that he was ready to go as soon as possible. He was unable to verify whether or not these were the same materials discussed by committee chairman Devin Nunes in press conferences last week.
The ranking member of the House intelligence committee said that, in his reply, he had insisted that it will ultimately be necessary to share any information with the full committee. and that they would need to work directly with the agencies that have custody of original documents. Despite Sean Spicer’s many statements that process didn’t matter during the White House press conference earlier in the afternoon, Schiff made it clear that, especially in a case about how information was leaked, process was all important. It would be impossible to tell if people were properly masked, and security properly maintained, without knowing the process by which the information was handled and distributed.
The biggest concern that Schiff raised was why, if these materials were discovered by NSC staff in “ordinary course of business” they weren’t turned over to the committee through ordinary process.
If these are the same materials that committee chair Devin Nunes viewed last week and talked about in a pair of press conferences, then Schiff wondered why staff within the White House with regular access to the president and other officials, would choose to bring in Nunes, feed him the information, then have him brief Trump.
It had the appearance, Shiff said, of using the intelligence committee to “launder information” and disguise its original source.
Schiff also spoke bluntly on the subject of the Russia investigation, saying that the committee was not going to be distracted. and declaring that they would get to the bottom of what Russia did, how it was done, and whether there was any collusion with the Trump campaign.
Representative Schiff also noted that the committee has completed a draft of an initial witness list, and said that he had signed onto the letter requesting that Director Comey attend a closed hearing. He also said that he had signed a letter inviting Yates, Clapper, Brennan to appear at a rescheduled public heading, but that Nunes has not yet signed.
Schiff was asked numerous questions concerning the nature of the materials, but said he had no answers. Though the New York Times story indicated that the material consisted of intercepts between two foreign sources, Schiff stated that he did know even know if the material is intercepts.
A question came up concerning whether or not Schiff considered that one of those talking to Nunes might be a “whistle blower,” but Schiff stated that the sources as described in the New York Times certainly didn’t seem to fit the definition of whistle blower. Anyone positioned in White House could have gone to the White House Counsel. There are steps inside the White House for handling whistle blowers, and certainly no need for all the “cloak and dagger stuff” involved in dragging in Nunes only to have Nunes brief Trump.
Schiff indicated that the two people mentioned in the Times story may be added to the witness list.
When asked if the New York Times story was related to the release of the letter, Schiff replied that the “the timing certainly looks fortuitous, and probably more than fortuitous.”