More signs that House panel’s Trump-Russia probe is reeling | McClatchy Washington Bureau

A week that began with a public hearing by House Intelligence Committee that confirmed the FBI is conducting a counter-intelligence investigation into possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s election campaign and Russia ended on Friday with “deeply disturbing signs” that a House probe into the same topic is breaking apart.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced Friday that he’d postponed what was to have been another public hearing on Tuesday, a decision that was angrily denounced moments later by Rep. Adam Schiff, the Californian who is the highest ranking Democrat on the committee. Schiff pointedly called the postponement was a cancellation.

Nunes had said the committee needed more time so they could hear in closed session more testimony from FBI director James Comey and his National Security Agency counterpart, Adm. Mike Rogers. The two had said Monday that they could not answer some questions in public, and Nunes said the committee needs those answers “before we can move forward.”

But Schiff accused Nunes of canceling the hearing, which was to have heard from Obama administration officials, to “choke off public information” and avoid any more embarrassment to the White House.

“I don’t think that anyone should have any doubt about what is really going on here,” Schiff said. “The point was to cancel a public hearing.”

Their competing views were just the latest sign that pledges that Congress could undertake an independent probe into Russian election meddling through its already existing committees is in deep trouble.

That’s been obvious since Wednesday, when Nunes announced that he’d become privy to documents that showed that Trump and his associates had been the subject of what is known in counterintelligence as “incidental collection” – a term employed to describe Americans whose names turn up in the communications of foreigners being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Nunes said the surveillance appeared to have been legal, authorized by the nation’s secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But in the context of the past month, when Trump accused President Barack Obama of having ordered that he be wiretapped, only to have that accusation rejected by congressional leaders and then, on Monday, Comey and Rogers, the revelation was explosive, if confusing.

“For the most part, the reports have value for intelligence,” Nunes said. “But there are some questions, some information in the documents that I don’t think belongs there.”

Lest anyone be confused about the nature of the reports, however, Schiff, who by Friday still had not seen the material, described the focus of those reports as intelligence on “foreign spies.” He characterized the way in which Nunes, and no one else on the committee, had gained access to the documents as a “dead of night” trip – he didn’t say to where – to view the documents.

Friday morning, Nunes told reporters outside the committee’s “no visitors allowed” chambers that the cancellation of Tuesday’s hearing, which was to take testimony from three Obama administration officials, was a scheduling matter. But Schiff used the same location to say he believed Nunes was acting at the bidding of the White House.

“I don’t think that anyone should have any doubt about what is really going on here,” Schiff said. “The point was to cancel a public hearing.”

Schiff pointed out that the three former officials scheduled to appear Tuesday – Obama-era Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates – had all agreed to testify in an open session. When they will now appear before the committee is not known, a committee spokesman said.

Intelligence committee hearings usually are behind closed doors, which made Monday’s session with Comey and Rogers uncommon enough, and added to the drama of Comey’s public announcement that the FBI was investigating close associates of the president for collusion with Russia.

Schiff said he was fighting to make sure the committee’s hearings are as public as possible. “We don’t welcome cutting off the public access to information,” he said.

But Nunes defended his move as necessary to let Comey and Rogers answer questions that they’d declined to respond to in public on Monday.

Between the two men, there were more than 50 questions the declined to answer during the nearly six-hour-long hearing. Among them, any details of investigations ordered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the names of anyone allegedly linked to the case, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who served in the Trump administration for 24 days before he was fired for misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador.

The two also declined to respond to questions about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manfort, who was fired in August when it was learned he was under investigation for possibly accepting $12 million from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine, and Roger Stone, a one-time Trump campaign adviser who has acknowledged contacts with WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 over pirated Democratic party emails.

Nunes said Friday said that Manafort had agreed to testify before the committee. “Manafort might be public, might be private,” Nunes said. “The details have yet to be worked out.”

Schiff, however, suggested Nunes now had a choice to make – “to decide if he’s leading an investigation into conduct which includes allegations of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House. Because he cannot do both.”

Schiff said that the canceled public hearing made it quite clear that the White House was unhappy with “the events of the week.”

“It must have been a very strong push back about the nature of Monday’s hearing,” Schiff said. “What other explanation can there be?”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the ranking Democrat in the House, earlier this week accused Nunes of having abandoned “any pretense of bipartisanship.”

But replacing him as committee chairman would require House Speaker Paul Ryan’s intervention and there was no sign of that.

Schiff, saying Trump is now “interfering in the House investigation,” repeated a call Democrats in the Senate and House – and some Republican senators – have been making for months.

“We really need an independent commission,” he said, to deal with the issue of Russian election meddling.