House Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Adam Schiff holds a press conference on Capitol Hill on March 30 after receiving a letter from the Trump administration. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Schiff: Did White House seek to launder evidence through Nunes?

Did the White House seek to “launder” information through the House Intelligence Committee?

That’s the question Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel’s top Democrat, asked Thursday as new details emerged about Chairman Devin Nunes’ secret visit to the White House grounds last week to view what he claims was possible evidence of wrongdoing by the Obama administration.


Nunes briefed President Donald Trump on the evidence the next day, even though it reportedly came from high-level White House staffers who likely could have taken the information to the president themselves, rather than first deliver it to Nunes.

The behavior by the California Republican and the White House has led to an outcry from Democrats, who say he has shown he is too close to Trump to lead an impartial investigation into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, including the possibility of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

The war of words continued Thursday as Schiff responded to the latest developments — an invitation from the White House for Democrats to review relevant classified evidence and a report in The New York Times that Nunes’ sources were senior White House national security staffers.

“If the object here was to give it to someone to give to the president, it makes it all the more bewildering why it wasn't just taken to the president,” Schiff told reporters at the Capitol. “The White House needs to answer, is this instead a case where they effectively wished to launder information through our committee to avoid” revealing the source?

Democrats so far have not been able to view the evidence Nunes cited in making his claim last week that Trump transition aides might have been improperly monitored following November’s presidential election — a break with tradition on a committee in which both sides of the aisle are normally provided access to the same information.

But White House press secretary Sean Spicer indicated on Thursday that Democrats might soon be able to go through the evidence.

In a letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, White House counsel Donald McGahn invited the chairmen and ranking members to come to the White House to view what it characterized as documents responsive to a congressional request for "information collected on U.S. persons [that] was mishandled and leaked." This appeared to be a reference to the evidence Nunes viewed last week on the White House grounds, though Spicer did not say that explicitly.

Schiff responded in a letter, obtained by POLITICO, saying he looked forward to viewing the materials at the “earliest opportunity.”

"I hope you will confirm to the committee whether these materials are the same as those first shared with the chairman,” the California Democrat wrote. “If they are this raises profound questions as to why these materials were given to the chairman for the purpose of providing to the president instead of being shared directly with the White House, and whether an effort was made to conceal their origin by providing them to the chairman first.”

On the Senate side, Intelligence Committee leaders are expected to ask the White House to simply send the documents to Capitol Hill, according to a congressional source.

"We’re saying, 'Great, we’re happy to take a look at those. Why can’t you send them over here?'" the source said.

Nunes set off a firestorm last week when he went public with the alleged evidence, which he said came from an unnamed “source.” He also denied that the whole thing had been orchestrated by the White House. But Democrats cried foul, saying they suspected this was all a scheme designed to take heat off Trump for his much-maligned claim that President Barack Obama had ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower — something even Nunes said his evidence does not show.

Schiff on Thursday vowed that he would not let these issues “distract us from doing our Russia investigation,” though he added that there’s “no doubt” that Nunes’ actions have cast a “cloud over the investigation.”

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that Nunes’ sources were Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence for the White House National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a White House lawyer and previously an aide on the House Intelligence Committee.

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Both of these staffers presumably would have had the ability to brief Trump themselves on the evidence they uncovered, rather than providing it to Nunes to take to the president.

Spicer on Thursday declined to comment on the Times’ report.

A spokesman for Nunes, Jack Langer, said, “Chairman Nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources.”

Meanwhile on Thursday, the Senate Intelligence panel — which has managed to operate in a bipartisan fashion, in stark contrast to the House — held a two-part hearing on Russia’s election interference.

As he exited the hearing, the panel’s top Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, expressed bewilderment when asked about The New York Times report on Nunes’ sources.

“It gets more bizarre every day,” Warner said.

Added Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), another member of the committee: “My reaction is I'm glad I'm on the Senate committee and not the House committee.”

Martin Matishak contributed to this report.