![]() ![]() ![]() “It was enormously frustrating,” Schiff says. ![]() Eric Swalwell, D-Calif.Īs a member of the minority party, Schiff lacked the power to subpoena crucial documents or compel witness testimony. Any time members of the committee asked his replacement, Mike Conaway, to make a decision, “we were told he’s ‘gotta run that up the chain,’ ” says Rep. “The reality,” Schiff says, “was that he never stepped aside.”Īccording to Schiff and other members of the committee, Nunes, who was eventually cleared of wrongdoing by the ethics committee, continued to operate as the shadow chair – signing subpoenas and dispatching members of his staff on clandestine foreign reconnaissance trips, including a failed attempt to locate Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who authored the Trump-Russia dossier. “The midnight run,” as Schiff has taken to calling it, “really changed the trajectory of the committee’s work.” The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation, and Nunes was eventually forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, at least officially. He didn’t disclose the fact that his knowledge of the alleged abuses originated from the White House itself. The next day, Nunes held a press conference outside the White House, announcing his plans to personally alert the president. A pair of presidential advisers briefed him on classified reports that surveillance of foreign officials had picked up communications of the Trump campaign and transition team (of which Nunes was a member). On the evening of March 21st, Nunes received a phone call summoning him to a meeting at the White House. It’s also the only committee where majority and minority staffs, many of them former intelligence-community folks, work together in a single room, a windowless space in the basement of the Capitol known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).Īlmost as soon as the investigation opened, the relationship collapsed. Members handle the country’s most sensitive secrets – the kind of material that could have life-or-death consequences. From the beginning, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has had a reputation as a uniquely apolitical group. A few years later, the 22-member panel became a permanent fixture, appropriating budgets, vetting policies and serving as a check on the intelligence community. Schiff, who is 57, was already bar mitzvahed by the time Congress convened a committee in 1975 following reports that the Central Intelligence Agency was illegally conducting surveillance on anti-war protesters. The House Intelligence Committee hasn’t been around very long. They viewed their job as defending the president.” “I think they viewed their job, apparently, differently than I did. “They thought it was an unmitigated disaster,” Schiff says. He’d learn only later that his Republican colleagues were devastated. But Schiff – mild-mannered, judicious, vegan – has sometimes struggled to, as Matthews puts it, “say something with bite.”įor Schiff, there was almost no metric by which the day could have gone better. The week of this particular MSNBC appearance, in March, the top Republican on the committee publicly declared, “We found no evidence of collusion.” It was the ending Schiff had tried to warn the American people was coming for months in an endless series of media hits, he repeatedly spoke of Republican efforts to sabotage what should have been a serious bipartisan effort. That’s the business we’re in.”įor the past year, as the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Schiff has been the face of a beleaguered investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. “You’ve got to say something that leads to impeachment,” Matthews urges. ![]() Adam Schiff, who just wrapped up an appearance on The Beat With Ari Melber, is getting his TV makeup wiped off, while Matthews offers some political wisdom to Schiff’s deputy communications director. on a Wednesday in MSNBC’s Washington, D.C., greenroom. “Here’s some advice,” says Hardball host Chris Matthews. ![]()
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