House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told reporters today that he has been invited by White House counsel to review intelligence materials that have to do with foreign surveillance and U.S. persons who may have been incidentally caught up in those conversations.
Last week, the White House allowed Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to review documents. When Nunes revealed his knowledge of the documents’ existence, he said names of persons in the Trump transition team had been “unmasked,” meaning their names should have been anonymous in the raw intelligence reports, but weren’t. Schiff said then that the timing of the request by the White House to view the documents “concerns me.”
When asked if he was being requested to view the same documents that Nunes has been referencing for more than a week, Schiff said, “None of us have any way of knowing.”
Schiff said that without the help of the intelligence agency or agencies that were involved in the collection of the surveillance, then he couldn’t be positive the documents were the same.
Even so, Schiff was eager to get started. “I’m happy to go tomorrow,” he said.
Nunes suggested the White House might have been using Nunes to launder the provenance of the documents.
“If, in-fact, the National Security Council staff that discovered these materials, reportedly in the ordinary course of business, are the same national security staff that provided them to the chairman to be provided to the president, it raises the profound question why they were not directly provided to the White House by the national security staff, and instead were provided in a circuitous route involving the chairman,” he said. “If that was designed to hide the origin of the materials, that raises profound questions about just what the White House is doing that need to be answered.”
The invitation to Schiff from the White House comes on the same day that a report by the New York Times identified two members of the Trump administration as being the source of the documents referenced by Nunes.
