Two months into the 117th Congress and the House Intelligence Committee is stuck with a skeleton crew.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the panel, said this week only himself and Chairman Adam Schiff have been appointed to the committee so far, and there is no explanation for why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding off on naming additional members.
“It’s rather strange, so we don’t know. She has not agreed on ratios, we should get another member, so we don’t know yet who she is going to appoint. It’s a big mystery around here. Everybody’s waiting to see,” the California Republican told the Washington Examiner’s Examining Politics podcast hosted by Larry O’Connor.
There has been a high level of intrigue about who will be picked for the select committee this session, particularly after it was revealed last year that one of its members, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, has ties to Christine Fang, a suspected Chinese spy.
Although Swalwell has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and Pelosi offered words of support for the fellow Democrat, top Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, demanded Swalwell be removed from the panel. In December, Nunes said GOP members of the House Intelligence Committee will investigate Swalwell if he is allowed to remain a member of the panel.
Questions also remain about whether Schiff, who also hails from California, will remain in Congress. Last month, Axios reported Schiff was lobbying Gov. Gavin Newsom to appoint him attorney general of the state, and Pelosi had given Schiff her blessing. All this rides on Xavier Becerra, California’s current attorney general, and his prospects on successfully navigating the Senate confirmation process to be President Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary.
Although Democrats control the House, Republicans closed the gap in the 2020 elections, a change in the balance of power that Nunes explained should result in the minority party gaining at least one more spot on the committee.
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“We sure should gain. It should be 12-10, and that’s typically what it would be,” Nunes said before insisting that Pelosi “continues to play games, and so the committee hasn’t even been organized.”
Both Pelosi and McCarthy expected to appoint members in the coming weeks, leadership aides told the Washington Examiner.
Although the membership equation as yet to be solved, punctuated by the House Intelligence Committee website, which still shows former Rep. John Ratcliffe as a member (he was confirmed as former President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence in May 2020), Schiff, Nunes, and their staffs remain active, including the chairman reissuing a subpoena to Deutsche Bank seeking, among other things, Trump’s financial records and investigating allegations of politicization of intelligence at the Homeland Security Department under the Trump administration.
Alluding to how bitter the political infighting was through the Trump era and into the Biden administration, Nunes quipped that it is “probably safer for America, unfortunately,” not to have a full committee up and running yet. “I hate to say that. It’s been so politicized over the years with becoming, essentially, the Russia hoax committee, then it turned into the impeachment committee, and that’s where it’s been,” said Nunes, who chaired the Intelligence Committee from 2015-19, including the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
In a virtual discussion this week hosted by the Hayden Center, Schiff bemoaned politicization of intelligence and its bearing on the committee as well as the U.S. intelligence community. The chairman also said he has been in talks with Republicans, including Nunes, about getting “back to some level of comity.”
But Schiff conceded there is “continuing anger, among other emotions” in the Democratic caucus aimed at Republican members who question the integrity of the 2020 election, “falsehoods that led to” the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers counted electoral votes to affirm Biden’s victory. “Nonetheless, the work of the committee has to get done, and so I’ve been talking to Republican members about trying to reset,” Schiff said.
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Nunes appeared less optimistic, predicting the Democrats who control both chambers of Congress are poised to expand investigations that will only serve to divide the country at large further.
“I think their new issue is going to be domestic violence and domestic extremism, for Republicans and conservatives only, of course, so they want to investigate every conservative in America,” Nunes said.
