The House Oversight and Reform Committee issued an interim report on Tuesday that details a chaotic, rushed effort by White House officials to help Saudi Arabia build its first-ever nuclear power plant in the country.

The committee report said administration officials faced conflicts of interest in pushing a plan to broker a deal between the Saudis and U.S. companies to build nuclear power plants in the country because they stood to reap personal financial benefits from the deals.

The conflicts surrounded Michael Flynn, the president's former national security adviser, his aide Derek Harvey, and former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland.

The whistleblowers "have also warned about a working environment inside the White House marked by chaos, dysfunction, and backbiting," the report concluded. It was issued by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee chairman who opened the probe.

The whistleblowers also warned that political appointees ignored directives from top White House ethics advisers to halt their efforts because they entailed conflicts of interest and risked running afoul of the law governing such deals.

Emails released by the committee showed that Flynn in 2017 had pushed for the president to back a plan to create a team of former generals to lead U.S. industry interests in building nuclear reactors in the Middle East.

Career staff had warned the political appointees that the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia under the plan would violate the Atomic Energy Act, the committee report said.

In order to strike a deal with the Saudis, an agreement must be struck under the law in which the U.S. takes possession of the spent nuclear fuel produced by the reactors. The U.S. retaining possession of the fuel would help ensure against using the fuel to make a bomb.

"Mr. Harvey reportedly ignored these warnings and insisted that the decision to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia had already been made," the report read. "Both career and political staff inside the White House reportedly agreed that Mr. Harvey’s directive could violate the law."

An unnamed official in the House report called the plan a money-making "scheme."

The Trump administration's nuclear negotiations with Saudi Arabia began in earnest last year during a visit by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Washington. But the negotiations stalled after the crown prince was implicated in an assassination plot that led to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The administration had wanted the Saudis to work with U.S. nuclear energy companies in building the first commercial and test reactors inside the Mideast country as part of Saudi Arabia's broad plan, called Vision 2030, to diversify the economy away from oil.

Lawmakers in Congress had cautioned the White House not to move too fast on any deal before a complete investigation into Saudi Arabia's role in Khashoggi's murder. Trump has defended the crown prince.

A bipartisan bill was introduced last year by Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., seeking to ensure the nuclear safeguards make it into any deal by making it subject to congressional approval.

“As I have long suspected, this administration’s push for nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia appears to be more about putting politically-connected private interests above national ones,” Markey said on Tuesday in response to the House report. "I believe any discussion of nuclear cooperation with the Kingdom should be suspended indefinitely" based on the findings, he said.