Three of the Senate’s top Republicans are asking the White House to let them into a Thursday meeting where classified information on the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign could be revealed in a meeting with two House committee chairmen.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas made the request in a letter sent to White House chief of staff John Kelly and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
In the letter sent Tuesday but made public Wednesday, the senators stated their “interest in attending such a meeting and in support of providing Congress with documents necessary to conduct oversight of these issues.”
“On Sunday, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein stated: ‘If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action.’ We agree,” they wrote.
Graham and Cornyn are also both part of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is conducting an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
No other details about the meeting have been released yet, just that Kelly has been tasked with arranging it.
So far, just House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. have been invited to the meeting.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said no White House officials will attend, but administration officials attending include FBI Director Christopher Wray, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed O’Callaghan.
Separately, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have asked Rosenstein and Wray to cancel the meeting with just Republican lawmakers, and instead hold a “Gang of Eight” bipartisan meeting.
“This meeting is completely improper in its proposed form and would set a damaging precedent for your institutions and the rule of law,” Schumer and Pelosi said in a statement on Wednesday. “We can think of no legitimate oversight justification for the ex parte dissemination — at the direction of the president — of investigative information to the president’s staunchest defenders in Congress and, ultimately, to the president’s legal defense team.”
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the meeting a “serious abuse of power” in a tweet.
But Sanders said at Tuesday’s press briefing that Democrats were not invited to the meeting because they “have not requested” the information as the GOP lawmakers.
The meeting has been called amid a lengthy spat between President Trump and his congressional allies, and the Justice Department and FBI over documents requests.
This specific request pertains to information on a confidential source — former University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, who made contact with at least three Trump campaign advisers. This revelation prompted Trump to claim the confidential source was planted for political purposes, and the Justice Department has since directed its inspector general to investigate such allegations.
Nunes has already issued a subpoena for documents related to the confidential source, but the Justice Department told him earlier this month in a letter that turning over the requested information would be a risk to national security.
