The Daily Beast reports House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) is not willing to answer questions about potential coordination with the White House on his controversial memo.
During Monday’s contentious closed-door committee meeting, Rep. Mike Quigley, a Democrat, asked Nunes point-blank if his staffers had been talking with the White House as they compiled a four-page memo alleging FBI and Justice Department abuses over surveillance of President Trump’s allies in the Russia probe.
According to sources familiar with the exchange, Nunes made a few comments that didn’t answer the question before finally responding, “I’m not answering.”
It would not be the first time Nunes worked with the White House on something questionable.
When President Trump sent a tweet with an accusation that President Obama had wiretapped his phones in Trump Tower, Nunes promised to investigate and embarked on a quest to prove the President’s claim true.
He traveled to the White House late at night on March 21, 2017 to view classified documents collected by Senior Director of Intelligence Programs Ezra Cohen-Watnick and reviewed by White House lawyers John Eisenberg and Michael Ellis, the latter of whom Nunes worked with on the House Intelligence Committee.
The following morning, Nunes teased out having information that revealed improper surveillance, went back to the White House to brief the President, and then shared his findings – that Trump officials has been caught in routine surveillance of foreign entities -- with the press.
The House Ethics Committee launched an investigation into Nunes for discussing classified reports on television. The committee cleared him in December, reportedly without ever reviewing the classified information in question.
Nunes thanked the committee for “completely clearing” him, and said it had found he “committed no violation.”
But the committee was never able to obtain or review the classified information at the heart of the inquiry, according to three congressional sources briefed on the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The panel’s inability to determine for itself what may or may not have been classified—and what Nunes had actually been shown—likely contributed to its decision to close the investigation, according to one source.
Read more: Devin Nunes Won’t Say if He Worked With White House on Anti-FBI Memo (Daily Beast)
The Circumscribed Ethics Investigation Into Devin Nunes (The Atlantic)