Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee announced Monday that the panel's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election was over. They also immediately declared that there was "no collusion" and that they disagreed with U.S. intelligence agencies' unanimous conclusion that Russia was trying to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. Word quickly spread that Republicans on the committee had not informed their Democratic colleagues that they were done conducting interviews, much less that the probe was over and Republicans were already drafting their report. Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic ranking member, came in with a hammer of a statement in response:

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BREAKING: GOP just shut down House Intel investigation, leaving questions unanswered, leads unexplored, countless witnesses uncalled, subpoenas unissued.



If Russians have leverage over the President, GOP has decided that it would rather not know. The minority's work continues: pic.twitter.com/oOf13n75Vo — Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) March 12, 2018

It was the ultimate sign of the committee's breakdown into partisan mudslinging, rivaled only by this calm and reasoned response from the President of the United States:

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THE HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HAS, AFTER A 14 MONTH LONG IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION, FOUND NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION OR COORDINATION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA TO INFLUENCE THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018

To round out the point, Republican Tom Rooney of Florida, a member of the committee, joined CNN Monday evening and admitted that while he backed closing the probe, it wasn't necessarily because the committee's business of investigating was done. (For instance, new reports Tuesday about Roger Stone's communications with Wikileaks are a reminder Stone refused to answer questions about those contacts during a voluntary appearance before the House panel. Schiff has said both he and Rep. Mike Conaway, the Republican leading the investigation on paper, thought it would be necessary to subpoena Stone. That would force him to answer those questions, but it appears that simply won't happen.)

Rooney suggested the House panel had devolved into a partisan food fight. In his words, "We’ve lost all credibility."

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"We've gone completely off the rails, and now we're just basically a political forum for people to leak information to drive the day's news...we've lost all credibility" - Rep. Tom Rooney on the Republican decision to end the House Russia investigation https://t.co/smu8O6gYSJ pic.twitter.com/wzgCf2oiKZ — OutFrontCNN (@OutFrontCNN) March 12, 2018

We've gone completely off the rails, and now we're just basically a political forum for people to leak information to drive the day's news. As you alluded to, we've lost all credibility, and we're going to issue probably two different reports, unfortunately. In that regard, that's why I called for the investigation to end.

That's quite juxtaposed to the aforementioned Presidential Reaction. It's also exactly the kind of honesty that we should demand from a public official. We don't expect a Republican to break with his party and committee and declare that the president is guilty of something. Maybe we can't even expect him to admit the collapse into partisanship was driven more by the behavior of Republican committee chair Devin Nunes—and his conflicts of interest as a former member of the Trump transition team—than by Schiff's responses to that behavior. But if the House investigation is compromised, we need to know.

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Nunes praised Schiff publicly in December 2016, but a few months later they were directly at odds. That had a whole lot to do with Nunes playing secret agent in the D.C. darkness, jumping out of an Uber and into another car so he could visit the White House grounds in the dead of night to receive classified intelligence related to surveillance of Trump campaign officials. He then briefed the president on that intelligence. Nunes faced an ethics investigation for that, and removed himself from the Russia probe as a result—at least in theory.

In reality, Nunes has been a constant, meddling presence in the committee's business, which culminated in the infamous Memo. That was a report full of cherrypicked intelligence data that ultimately proved to be a nothingburger anyway. But with Schiff's release of a counter-memo, it also represented the precipitous decline of bipartisan cooperation—and the pursuit of any kind of objective findings—in the committee. When Democrats release their own report on the sum total of the committee's work, that will be the ultimate sign of the deterioration. Rooney should be commended for his measure of honesty. Two other probes remain, and both deserve the same scrutiny Devin Nunes and his House charade have received.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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