The top Democrat on one of the congressional committees investigating ties between Donald Trump and Russia has raised “grave doubt” over the viability of the inquiry after its Republican chairman shared information with the White House and not their committee colleagues.



In the latest wild development surrounding the Russia inquiry that has created an air of scandal around Trump, Democrat Adam Schiff effectively called his GOP counterpart, Devin Nunes, a proxy for the White House, questioning his conduct.

“These actions raise enormous doubt about whether the committee can do its work,” Schiff said late Wednesday afternoon after speaking with Nunes, his fellow Californian, before telling MSNBC that evidence tying Trump to Russia now appeared “more than circumstantial”.

Two days after testimony from the directors of the FBI and NSA that dismissed any factual basis to Trump’s 4 March claim that Barack Obama had him placed under surveillance, Nunes publicly stated he was “alarmed” to learn that the intelligence agencies may have “incidentally” collected communications from Trump and his associates.

Nunes, who served on Trump’s national security transition team, said the surveillance “appears to be all legally collected” and masked the identities of Americans, but did so in such a way that Nunes could hazard a guess as to whom the intercepted communications discussed. Nunes added that the alleged intercepts did not actually concern Russia.

“Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting,” said Nunes, who has shifted the focus of the inquiry onto leaks that Trump blames on the intelligence agencies.

Nunes went to the White House to brief the president, who seized on the chairman’s comments as vindication, even though there is little evidence even in Nunes’s vague and often conditional remarks that they revive Trump’s claim that Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped.

“I somewhat do. I must tell you I somewhat do. I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found, I somewhat do,” Trump said Wednesday afternoon.

Nunes took whatever material he had acquired to Trump before sharing it with the committee – a decision that represented nearly a final straw for Schiff, who called for an independent commission to investigate ties between Trump and Russia.

In language that stripped away any pretense of cordiality remaining on the committee, Schiff said Nunes would have to decide whether to helm a credible inquiry or whether to operate as a White House adjunct, complicit in what Schiff intimated was a “campaign by the White House to deflect from the [FBI] director’s testimony”.

Asked if Schiff was considering pulling out of the inquiry, Schiff said he would have to “analyze what this development means”, suggesting a potential Democratic departure from one of the most internationally watched congressional investigations in recent history.

“If you have a chairman who is interacting with the White House, sharing information with the White House, when the people around the White House are the subject of the investigation and doing it before sharing it with the committee, it puts a profound doubt over whether that can be done credibly,” Schiff said.

Schiff reiterated that from what he had gleaned from his conversation with Nunes, “there is still no evidence that the president was wiretapped by his predecessor”.

Without receiving the actual intercept, Schiff said, it was “impossible” to evaluate the merits of Nunes’s claims.

Republicans in the House and Senate continue to resist Democratic demands for an independent commission modeled on the one comprised of retired eminences from both parties that investigated the 9/11 attacks. Schiff said he would raise the issue again with House speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican.

Incidental collection occurs when a communications intercept aimed at a foreign spy or proxy captures either an American in conversation with that foreign operative or discusses information about an American. An inevitability in an age of mass surveillance, and frequent even in targeted surveillance, the NSA has procedures in place to mask Americans’ identity, but Edward Snowden’s revelations have raised grave doubts about their robustness.

Given Nunes’s concerns about leaks of classified information, some questioned whether Nunes himself had confirmed the existence of a classified intercept under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“Representative Nunes’s statements would appear to reveal classified information, which is a serious concern. With regard to the substance of his claims, I have no idea what he is talking about,” said Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, which is also investigating the Trump-Russia question.

The House committee is schedule to meet on 28 March to hear testimony on the Trump-Russia allegations from former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former CIA director John Brennan.