“What he has done is he’s scuttled, and put a cloud over, his own investigation," Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings says. | AP Photo Rep. Cummings: Nunes should be investigated

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings on Thursday called for an investigation into House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, who on Wednesday personally briefed President Donald Trump and announced publicly that a source showed him evidence that the Obama administration had inadvertently collected surveillance on members of the Trump transition team.



“What he has done is he’s scuttled, and put a cloud over, his own investigation, and he has become the subject —basically, he should be — of an investigation,” Cummings said on CNN Thursday morning. “It’s a real problem.”

Cummings, a Democrat, is one of several Democratic legislators who have rebuked Nunes, a Trump ally in charge of leading the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russians to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Cummings criticized Nunes for not informing other members of the House Intelligence Committee of the evidence Nunes said he had obtained, and said Nunes’ conduct threatened the integrity of the investigation into the Trump campaign's possible relationship with Russian intelligence.


Cummings’ comments are similar to ones made by House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Adam Schiff, who during a press conference Wednesday night said that Nunes’ behavior casted “great doubt into the ability of both the chairman and the committee to conduct the investigation the way it ought to be conducted.”

On CNN, Cummings said Nunes should “look at Adam Schiff” to learn “how to conduct himself.”

Cummings, who served as a ranking minority member of the special committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attack on the Benghazi beginning in 2012, told CNN host Chris Cuomo that the Benghazi committee “would have never allowed” for a member to go directly to the president and to the press about information without informing the committee first.

“The intelligence committee is a very special committee,” Cummings said. “They are privy to information that most members of Congress may never see, and so you expect them to be extremely confidential.