Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, says he is perturbed by the revelation by Devin Nunes, the panel’s chairman, that “good FBI agents” gave him an early tip in September 2016 about the agency finding more emails related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
During an interview Sunday with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Schiff questioned who else may have been privy to this information before FBI Director James Comey informed Congress in late October 2016 that new emails potentially important to the Clinton email server investigation had been found and therefore was reopening the investigation less than two weeks before the 2016 election.
“This is the first that he heard about it,” the California Democrat told host Chuck Todd. “And it is deeply disturbing because if this was shared by New York field agents with Devin Nunes, was it also shared with Rudy Giuliani?” Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, is a recent addition to President Trump’s outside legal team dealing with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“Or did Devin Nunes do something which we have seen subsequently, which is coordinate with the Trump team? Was this information shared by the committee with Rudy Giuliani or shared directly with him?” Schiff added.
On Thursday, Nunes revealed to Fox News host Laura Ingraham that the “whistleblowers” came to him about the emails, but was unable to say or do anything about the sensitive information previously. But that changed when the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the handling of the Clinton emails investigation was released that day.
“We actually had, and I’ve never actually said this before because we had whistleblowers but we couldn’t really use the information but now that it’s in the IG report we can,” the California Republican said. “We had whistleblowers that came to us in late September of 2016 who talked to us about this laptop sitting up in New York that had additional emails on it.”
“So good FBI agents brought this to our attention, but what could we do with it?” he added, before knocking “Comey and company” for playing a “game.”
The IG report found that FBI agents routinely leaked to the media and received “improper” gifts from reporters.
Nunes also stated that the IG report revealed another instance of “obstruction,” as it contained text messages he had unsuccessfully sought since last year that he argued were “pertinent” to the intelligence committee’s investigations into alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
He was cleared last year by the House Ethics Committee on allegations that he mishandled classified information when he said a Trump transition team member had their communications monitored by the U.S. intelligence community.
Meanwhile, Schiff has been accused of leaking classified information, including by President Trump.
