Lack of House Intelligence If Devin Nunes has to resign, then so should Adam Schiff.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/lack-of-house-intelligence-1490742032
Devin Nunes is refusing Democratic calls to resign as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and rightly so. If Mr. Nunes is going to step down for speaking out of school to the White House about his probe, then ranking Democrat Adam Schiff should also resign for spreading innuendo without evidence across the airwaves.
Mr. Nunes blundered when he informed the White House about some information he received without first telling committee Democrats. The intelligence panel is one of the least partisan on Capitol Hill, and Mr. Nunes handed Democrats an opening to cast doubt on his fairness. He should protect his own credibility more than he protects the White House, which has nothing to worry about if President Trump’s claims about his lack of Russian ties are true.
But the main reason Democrats are mad at Mr. Nunes is because he’s raising an issue they’d rather avoid—to wit, that he’s seen documents showing that U.S. intelligence agencies may have “incidentally” collected information about people connected to Mr. Trump.
We know from leaks to the media that one of those people was former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who lost his job over the news. These columns have been asking since the Flynn news broke whether there was a proper FISA court order for this eavesdropping, or why if it was incidental was it spread widely enough to leak? Such information is supposed to be “minimized” and not widely shared so innocent Americans are protected if they happen to speak to a foreigner who is surveilled.
Mr. Trump was wrong to claim that Mr. Nunes has vindicated his famous tweet of three weeks ago that President Obama had wiretapped him in Trump Tower. Mr. Nunes has said he’s seen no evidence of that. But the issue of whether and why the Obama Administration was listening to Trump officials is important for the public to know. The U.S. government must have a very good reason for eavesdropping on political opponents, and civil libertarians would be shouting if Mr. Flynn were a Democrat.
Which brings us to Mr. Schiff, who while posing as a truth-teller is becoming more partisan by the hour. The California Democrat started out telling everyone that there is “circumstantial evidence of collusion” between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. He later escalated to claiming “there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” without providing any such evidence. If Mr. Schiff is so confident of the Russia-Trump connection, why not wait for the evidence to come out?
Meanwhile, Mr. Schiff evinces no interest in discussing, or even investigating, what happened to Mr. Flynn and why. Maybe he’s shouting so much about Mr. Nunes because he doesn’t want to know the answers to the questions the Republican is asking.
One question to ask about the eavesdropping on Mr. Flynn is whether there was “reverse targeting”—that is, whether a FISA order was put on the Russian ambassador Mr. Flynn spoke with in order to listen to Trump officials. We ask because reverse targeting was a big concern among Democrats like Senator Ron Wyden when surveillance legislation was last debated.
There’s plenty of partisanship on both sides of House Intelligence, and we wish they behaved better. But the larger goal is to find out, and tell the public, what happened, and that’s what they ought to focus on.
Comments are closed.
