Republicans closely aligned with President Trump, specifically Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), have done severe damage to the reputation of the House Intelligence Committee as a vehicle to conduct serious investigations expected to rise about politics.
Should Democrats win majority control, the question remains whether they can fix what has been broken.
"It's one of the worst situations I've seen in the time I've witnessed it, from the creation of the Intelligence Committee" in 1977, said former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who earlier in his career spent 16 years in Congress. "It's going to be hard to heal."
Bitter partisanship within the committee, Panetta said, exacerbated by President Trump's sometimes critical, often ambivalent posture toward the intelligence community, has brought about "the worst of all worlds."
"Both parties are engaged in political warfare and it puts the intelligence community in a difficult position," Panetta said. "I think obviously as a result of the politicization of the committee, the intelligence community [is] … going to think twice about presenting the full story," Panetta said.
Particularly damaging for the committee were last winter's "memo wars," during which both sides fought bitterly to publicly release fundamentally political documents containing classified information about the FBI's use of surveillance to monitor former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Over rare public admonitions from the FBI, which cited "grave concerns" about the release of the Republicans' memo, President Trump declassified its contents; he agreed only to the release of a redacted Democrat memo – which largely defended the FBI's work – after several weeks.
Infighting has affected who in the intelligence agencies is will to appear before the committee, which in turn impacts what information makes it to Congress.
One former senior Republican committee official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that, still today, current intelligence and law enforcement officials from multiple agencies "fight about who has to go" before the panel. "They just dread going in there."
"It's very partisan. The questions aren't about good oversight of the intelligence business – they're about how to score political points," the former official said.
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Mark Lowenthal, who served as the committee's staff director from 1995 to 1997, said the committee, in apparently losing some of the intelligence community's trust, was abdicating one of its core responsibilities. "You have to be their best friend and their severest critic," he said of the 17 intelligence agencies the committee oversees. "If there's no one [the intelligence community] can go to, that becomes a serious problem."
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"The committee has been hindered in doing meaningful oversight because of the extreme partisanship. If oversight of the entire intelligence community doesn't happen here, it just doesn't happen," [Mike Rogers, a former congressman from Michigan who was the committee's chairman from 2011 to 2015,] said.
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A former FBI field agent, Rogers said the intelligence community – including, and maybe especially, the FBI – will need reassurances that their work products will be treated as national security tools, not political weapons.
"They will more willingly submit to oversight if they know you're also trying to help them be successful," he said. "Right now, the committee has got it all ass-backwards."
Whether or not the Intel committee can start to mend under Democratic leadership comes down to whether Nunes stays as ranking member.
"We're either going to have to live with him or work around him," one senior Democratic committee official said, expressing concerns that Nunes has "no credibility with the people we oversee."
"We need that to effectively do our job," the official said.
As for the Russia investigation, Democrats have indicated they plan to fill in the gaps between what they wanted to investigate what Republicans allowed them to pursue.
... Since the Republicans shut down the investigation in March, two known witnesses – Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie and Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos, wife of Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos – have voluntarily testified before the minority, each with minimal fanfare.
In a status update released last March, however, Democrats listed more than 30 witnesses and 20 entities they said were "vital" to arriving at an understanding of what happened in 2016. In order to conduct a "legitimate" investigation, the minority said at the time, it would have to interview Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, whose testimony Democrats called "essential" to a full understanding of core issues of potential collusion and obstruction of justice. (Each of those witnesses has pleaded guilty; Papadopoulos has also been sentenced.)
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It is not entirely clear how current [Ranking Member Adam] Schiff (D-CA) himself would have things go. He has publicly called for a broad swath of potential investigations into President Trump's finances and foreign connections. In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, he wrote it would be "negligent to our national security" not to investigate "serious and credible allegations" of Russia's financial leverage over the president and the Trump Organization. In a statement to CBS, he said the committee would have to "fully assess" what areas of still require a full accounting, "based on a review of the extensive body of information we have collected, along with what the Senate and the Special Counsel have uncovered."
Should Republicans retain control of the House and Nunes control of the committee, he intends to keep investigating the investigators involved in the Russia probe.
No matter what, the Republican membership will change meaningfully. In addition to [Rep. Tom] Rooney, R-Florida, three current members – Reps. Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida, and Frank LoBiondo, R-New Jersey – are leaving Congress. Two – Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas and Elise Stefanik, R-New York – are facing challenging reelection contests. And both Rep. Conaway and Rep. Peter King, R-New York, would require waivers to remain on the committee, which has an 8-year membership limit.
As is true for the Democrats, all decisions about the committee's membership – including the choice of chair or ranking member, depending on the midterms' outcome – will be made by congressional leadership, itself a looming unknown.
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"You would hope that if the Democrats take control of the House they would recognize the importance of restoring the bipartisan role of that committee," Secretary Panetta said, "and make sure the chair and the ranking member are working together."
To that end, he said, "I think the Republicans would do well, frankly, to not have Nunes as ranking member – I think he's poisoned the well."
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Panetta said inflexibility and a continued insistence on political gains by either side would all but guarantee continued "trench warfare."
"And no matter what," he said, "That new chairman is going to be tested."
House Intel: Post-midterms, how much can the committee change? (CBS News)