© Alex Brandon/KJNHIC chair Adam Schiff • Ranking member HIC Devin Nunes
Led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, 27 GOP lawmakers said in a Tuesday letter that the House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously in fall 2018 to release dozens of witness interview transcripts from its Trump-Russia investigation, but the transcripts have not been made public.
"We understand now that Chairman Schiff is blocking the release of these transcripts. This news, if accurate, is disturbing — especially in light of Chairman Schiff's cries in 2019 for transparency regarding allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia," the congressmen said. "For almost four years, prominent Democrat politicians and commentators alleged that President Trump colluded with Russia, with Chairman Schiff going as far as to say that he had 'direct evidence' of collusion. Now that these allegations have been disproven by several investigations, the American people deserve to have transparency about why public figures such as Chairman Schiff continued to promote such wild accusations."
The letter is addressed to Schiff and Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the panel.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's lengthy December report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for 17 "significant errors and omissions" related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page and for the bureau's reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele's unverified dossier. Steele put his research together at the behest of Glenn Simpson's opposition research firm Fusion GPS, funded by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.
Since its release, declassified footnotes from the Horowitz report show that the FBI was aware Steele's dossier may have been compromised by Russian disinformation.
The GOP lawmakers told Schiff, "We write to request access to the interview transcripts and other material obtained during HPSCI's investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election ... and hope you will choose to make this material available to the American people."
The declassification process by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was expected to take just a few weeks or months, but nearly two years later, GOP congressmen and Trump administration officials are blaming Schiff for the delay.
"Adam Schiff is thwarting the will of the House Intelligence Committee as expressed in the bipartisan vote in September 2018 to make these transcripts public," one senior intelligence official told the Washington Examiner late last month. "He has appointed himself arbiter of what the public should see and has refused to allow the White House to review its own equities, making declassification of 10 of the transcripts impossible. It's difficult to imagine any motive other than Schiff is still trying to control the narrative on Russia collusion."
Forty-three of the 53 transcripts have gone through the declassification process and were returned to Schiff over half a year ago, but he has not released them despite promising last fall to make them public quickly.
"Short of public disclosure, however, we require access to this material for our ongoing oversight of the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation," the GOP letter stated, adding, "We respectfully request that HPSCI grant us access to the transcripts of all interviews conducted and other material obtained during the committee's investigation."
A sticking point with the remaining 10 transcripts is the desire by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to allow the White House to review them as part of the declassification process, which Schiff has rejected.
"Under no circumstances shall ODNI, or any other element of the Intelligence Community, share any HPSCI transcripts with the White House, President Trump, or any persons associated with the White House or the President," the California Democrat said in 2019. He accused the White House of "hijacking" the process in an interview with Politico last year.
Schiff's office did not respond to the Washington Examiner's requests for an update on why the 53 Russia investigation witness transcripts have not been released.
The 10 transcripts that Schiff blocked the White House from viewing are from interviews of Trump son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, former chief executive for the Trump campaign Steve Bannon, former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, former White House deputy assistant Keith Schiller, and Mary McCord, a former assistant attorney general for national security who was involved in the FBI's Russia investigation.
Among the 43 other witness interviews were testimony by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Donald Trump Jr., White House adviser Hope Hicks, longtime Trump friend and recently convicted "fixer" Roger Stone, former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Perkins Coie lawyers Michael Sussman, a former DOJ lawyer who passed along alleged details about Russian interference to former FBI general counsel James Baker, and Marc Elias, the chairman who was the Clinton campaign's general counsel and who hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the campaign, were also among them.
Special counsel Robert Mueller's 448-page report, released in April 2019, said his investigation found the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election in a "sweeping and systematic fashion," but it "did not establish" any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Jordan Letter to Schiff on ... by Washington Examiner on Scribd
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