The House Intelligence committee’s top Democrat said Sunday that it is too early to say whether there was collusion between the Trump team and Russia, in an apparent moderation of his past claims on the subject.
Schiff’s remarks come as his committee probes any potential Trump team-Russia coordination as well as the leaks that precipitated the resignation of former national security adviser Mike Flynn as part of a broader investigation into Russian meddling.
“I don’t think we can say anything definitively at this point,” Schiff said on CNN’s State of the Union when asked about potential collusion. “We are still at the very early stage of the investigation.”
“The only thing I can say is that it would be irresponsible for us not to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
Schiff said on March 22nd that he had seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion between Trump associates and the Kremlin.
“I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” he said on Meet the Press Daily.
Those remarks came the same day that the Republican chairman of the committee Devin Nunes made controversial allegations
“On numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition,” Nunes told reporters. “Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value, were widely disseminated in intelligence community reports.”
He stressed that the surveillance was not related to Russia. Nunes also said that the names of Trump transition team members were unmasked, or revealed.
The allegations set off a week of squabbling between Nunes and Schiff, effectively pausing the committee’s Russia investigation.
Schiff questioned why Nunes had not come to him to discuss the intelligence reports before briefing the press and the president on them that Wednesday.
He and other Democrats on the committee called for Nunes to recuse himself, pointing in part to the chairman’s close relationship with the White House.
The White House invited Schiff to view what were apparently the same documents Thursday. That day, the New York Times reported that two White House staffers had helped provide Nunes with the documents.
Fox News reported Friday that Nunes found out about the unmasking in January via intelligence community sources.
Schiff, who viewed the documents Friday, would not go into the details of the documents on State of the Union Sunday, but said he did not agree with Nunes’s “characterization” of the reports.
