The House Intelligence Committee, for years considered an oasis of bipartisanship in a fractious Congress, has collapsed into what many lawmakers call unprecedented bitterness and distrust that endangers its core mission of protecting national security.

The panel is one of three congressional committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether any associates of President Donald Trump abetted the foreign plot.


But its probe has drawn unusual attention to the committee itself, thanks to personal feuds, accusations of leaking, disputes about the nature of its investigation, and the controversial role of its enigmatic Republican chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes of California.

One GOP member of the panel says Republican committee staffers have received an ethics complaint for media leaks. Nunes has reportedly ordered the construction of a wall to divide the historically intermingled Democratic and Republican staff. And House Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, have mounted an effort to target Nunes for removal from the committee, an idea Speaker Paul Ryan derided earlier this month as "political."

“It’s heartbreaking,” said former California Congresswoman Jane Harman, who spent several years as the committee’s top Democrat in the 2000s amid furious debates over post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy and pre-Iraq War intelligence failures. “We had fights. But most of the time there was agreement. What’s going on now would have been unimaginable.”

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The friction over the Russia probe is so intense, some committee members say, that it is interfering with the panel’s basic job of overseeing the U.S. intelligence community on issues ranging from terrorism to North Korea’s nuclear program to Chinese espionage. One recent committee briefing on global hotspots was sparsely attended because members were busy spinning reporters about a Russia-related dispute, according to Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.).

“I think most of us would have preferred to have spent all this time thinking about North Korea and Iran and Russia and China,” said Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), one of the panels top Republicans, adding that Russia “is a threat beyond” the specific question of 2016 election interference. “But we weren’t dealt those cards.”



The acrimony has built for months, but exploded in recent weeks after committee Republicans, led by Nunes, released a once-classified memo alleging misconduct among Justice Department and FBI officials seeking an October 2016 surveillance warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page as part of their investigation into possible Russian influence over the Trump campaign. Trump has claimed that the memo “vindicated” him. Committee Democrats have responded to the GOP claims in their own memo, which Trump declined to release last week citing Justice Department concerns about passages containing classified material.

"HPSCI is poison right now," Rooney said, using the acronym for House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Likening the feuding to a “cancer,” he suggested Speaker Paul Ryan and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi consider an intervention.

Another committee member, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), agreed that political infighting has begun to detract from the committee's non-Russia work.

"It has to," he said. "It’s so much effort. Even if we were getting along, we’d still have a tremendous amount of extra time [spent on the probe]."

King also said he feared the problem will only worsen in the weeks ahead, as committee Republicans seek to wind down the Russia inquiry while Democrats press for dozens more witnesses.

"The pressure’s going to get more intense. We have to finish the investigation," he said. "The Democrats want 87 more witnesses. I can’t see us going more than one or two."

Democrats say the committee rancor flows from Nunes, who signaled shortly after Trump took office that he was primarily interested in uncovering potential Obama administration wrongdoing. Nunes has alleged that Obama White House officials misused surveillance involving Trump campaign officials for political purposes, even paying an unusual late-night trip to the White House to review secret intelligence which he later briefed Trump on.

There is no evidence that Obama White House officials did mishandle such intelligence. Nunes stepped aside from the Russia investigation last April after progressive groups filed an ethics complaint about his White House visit. After that complaint was dismissed in December, Nunes quickly reassumed a leading role — conducting research, without the knowledge of Democrats, which produced the GOP memo on the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page.

Republicans, in turn, say Democrats on their committee are more interested in scoring political points against Trump than in a fair-minded investigation into Russian election interference. They say the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California in particular has become a television grandstander who characterizes evidence and testimony involving Trump and his associates in the most sinister possible light.

In a Sunday tweet, Trump branded Schiff “the leakin’ monster out of control.”

"Everybody’s so eager to blame Devin. I can’t tell you that it’s Devin’s fault that the atmosphere down there is what it is," said Rooney, who announced his retirement Monday. "You could easily just say the same thing about Adam on our side."



The tensions are a sharp break from the committee’s recent history, in which members prided themselves on overcoming partisan differences in the national interest. Nunes’s and Schiff’s predecessors, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), rarely feuded in public.

Harman said she had occasional blowups with her Republican counterparts but generally worked well with them. She noted that the House and Senate intelligence panels conducted a joint inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks and produced a report with unanimous bipartisan backing.

“Even when we had to try to assess why there were these colossal intelligence failures — 9/11 and Iraq WMD — the goal was to keep the country safe. What’s going on now would have been unimaginable,” Harman said. “This business with the competing public documents? We never would have thought about it.”

One factor exacerbating the tension is a deep sense of mutual distrust among Democrats and Republicans who accuse one another of distorted media leaks.

Rooney told CBS earlier this week that the "entire Republican staff" is facing a leaks inquiry from the Office of Congressional Ethics, though he said he didn’t know the origin of the inquiry.

The revelation came amid reports that Nunes has ordered the construction of a wall to divide the committee staff's secure workspace into Republican and Democratic sides, a symbolic reflection of the larger partisan friction among lawmakers. The committee has majority and minority staff, but aides have traditionally worked together unaffected by tension among their bosses.

Trump allies have long accused committee Democrats of reckless leaking — even suggesting they fed media reports about a committee interview of Donald Trump Jr. that broke before the panel had even finished interviewing the president’s son. (Trump Jr.'s lawyer has called for for an inquiry.)

King said he and other Republicans believe political ambition might be part of the problem: Speculation that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) might retire has led to talk that Schiff could be a lead candidate to succeed her —giving Schiff an incentive to raise his national profile.

Unlike other House committees, HPSCI's work is directly linked to the speaker and House minority leader. As a "select committee," its members are picked unilaterally by Ryan and Pelosi, unlike other committees whose leaders and members are voted on by a broader group of colleagues. Rooney suggested there might be value in Ryan, Pelosi, Nunes and Schiff in getting together and trying to lower the temperature.

Schiff, though, said his conditions for a better working relationship were simple: mount a legitimate Russia investigation. He and his colleagues have complained for months that Republicans on the panel have underused their subpoena power, refusing to compel answers from stonewalling witnesses and declining to pursue avenues of inquiry — such as the prospect of money laundering to conceal financial cooperation between Trump associates and Russia — by demanding bank records from key witnesses and institutions.

"The GOP needs to make a decision, from the speaker to the chairman to the members of our committee. Are they serious about doing a credible Russia investigation?" Schiff said in an interview. "If they are, then there’s a good way to work together. If they’re not then they ought to just get out of the way. Because we’re not going to go along with a whitewash of the administration just in the interest of bipartisanship."



Not all members of the panel view the committee as hopelessly dysfunctional. Conaway, who assumed day-to-day leadership of the panel's Russia probe when Nunes stepped aside, noted that despite the hostility, the committee managed to come together on a few big priorities over the last year. The panel worked together to renew a critical spying program and to pass a bill reauthorizing funding for the intelligence community.

"We pretty well compartmentalize as we do with lots of legislation around here," he said. “You’re on the same side of some issues and against each other on some issues," Conaway said. "Members are pretty good at trying to separate that out and trying not to let it affect what you’re doing."

A spokeswoman for Ryan said the committee had spent a year "conducting a bipartisan investigation into Russia meddling in our elections last cycle."

"Just this week, CIA Director Pompeo stated Russia is looking to further meddle in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections," the spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, said in a statement. "The serious work the Intel Committee is conducting will inform and help protect future elections, which should be everyone’s goal at this point.”

Nunes' office declined to comment.

Schiff noted with irony that one of the rare bipartisan moments in the committee's year-long Russia probe has come over its frustration with former senior White House adviser Steve Bannon's refusal to answer questions.

The committee subpoenaed him to his face last month and is now weighing whether to hold him in contempt of Congress.

“Hats off to Steve Bannon," Schiff said on Thursday. "He’s done the impossible: He brought our committee together.”

Michael Crowley contributed reporting.

