[Infowarrior] - How the House Intel Committee Broke Bad

[Richard Forno]

How the House Intel Committee Broke Bad

It’s not just Devin Nunes. The House’s dysfunctional oversight has been decades in the making.

By MIEKE EOYANG

February 20, 2018

One committee’s leaders snipe at each other behind closed doors and trash each other openly on television. The other committee’s leaders pride themselves on mutual respect and rarely draw the media into their disagreements, to the extent there are any. One committee chairman has launched a parallel investigation into the FBI and the Department of Justice; the other has plowed ahead with what appears to be a serious look into what happened during the 2016 election. Both committees are run by Republicans. Both have been charged with leading the investigation into Russian meddling in U.S. politics, but their approaches have been radically, alarmingly divergent. Why? What makes the House and Senate intelligence committees—which were set up to improve congressional oversight in the wake of 1960s and 70s-era abuses by the executive branch agencies—such different beasts?

The answer starts with Rep. Devin Nunes, but it doesn’t end there. For nearly a year now, those of us who want to get to the bottom of what happened in 2016 have been alternately baffled and outraged by the antics of Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Nunes, a California Republican and member of Trump’s national security transition team, showed signs early on that he was not conducting a normal investigation. He dashed off into the night, sneaking into the White House to view classified files, and then publicly claimed that the arcane process known as “unmasking” was used improperly—a claim rejected by his Senate counterparts and former administration intelligence officials. He then recused himself from HPSCI’s Russia investigation while the Ethics Committee looked into his behavior. Despite his recusal, he continued to investigate Russia matters, sending his staff to London to track down dossier author Christopher Steele and issuing subpoenas to some witnesses while denying others. He engineered the release of a memo claiming impropriety in the surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page that the president’s own FBI and Justice Department said were misleading. And then, amid the backlash, he threatened to build a wall at HPSCI to separate the Democratic and Republican staff. As a former HPSCI staffer, let me assure you—none of this is normal.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, the Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) is running an investigation that seems to operate in an alternate universe of bipartisanship and common purpose. When Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) give rare public updates, they appear side by side at the podium. At the recent hearing on worldwide threats to the U.S., Chairman Burr thanked intelligence agency heads for their cooperation with the Senate’s investigation and noted, “The remarks of everyone who has come before us has commented on their [staffers’] professionalism, and at the end of 8 hours they couldn’t tell who is a Republican or a Democrat. The effort to be bipartisan isn’t just public, it is private as well, and has permeated all our efforts, down to our staff.”

As stark as this distinction is, the House-Senate difference is not just a product of the different personalities of their respective chairmen. The roots of the current differences in the committee approaches can be seen in the history, rules and culture that govern each chambers’ approach to intelligence oversight. These two committees were born different....

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/20/house-intel-committee-oversight-217033