The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously in the fall of 2018 to release dozens of witness interview transcripts from its investigation into Russian interference, but the transcripts have not been made public.
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, some administration officials, as well as ranking Republican member Devin Nunes, are blaming Chairman Adam 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. “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. Just The News reported on aspects of this controversy earlier this week.
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.
In March 2019, under then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, ODNI staffers briefed the House Intelligence Committee that some of the interviews implicated “White House equities” and that the top spy office “looked for mention of interactions or communications with current or former [White House] and [National Security Council] officials either during transition or after descriptions of policies or direction established within the [White House] and [NSC]” as part of the declassification process, according to a letter Schiff sent to the ODNI obtained by the Washington Examiner. The ODNI said some of the witness testimony “could be privileged” and that a determination like that “can only be made by” the White House.
Schiff rejected the request from Coats a week later.
“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,” Schiff wrote. “Such transcripts remain the sole property of HPSCI, and were transmitted to ODNI for the limited purpose of enabling a classification review by IC elements and the Department of Justice.”
Coats left the ODNI in August 2019. He was succeeded by Joseph Maguire, who, after the Ukraine impeachment controversy, was replaced by Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany.
The Washington Examiner has learned that at least two of the 10 disputed transcripts do not contain classified information and that Schiff could release them, along with the 43 other declassified transcripts.
Nunes told the Washington Examiner that Schiff should make the already declassified transcripts public immediately.
“HPSCI Democrats opposed every Republican document request and subpoena that helped to expose malfeasance in the FBI’s Russia collusion probe. And now, by refusing to publish the witness transcripts or the transcript of the committee’s briefing with former [intelligence community Inspector General] Michael Atkinson, the Democrats are blatantly continuing to hide documents that expose their own mistruths,” Nunes said. “There is no reason for keeping these documents secret except that they want to hide what’s in them.”
In January, an official from Schiff’s committee staff claimed to the Washington Times that Atkinson’s testimony about his controversial handling of the Ukraine whistleblower complaint was not conducted in conjunction with the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Oversight Committee, the two other House panels helping lead the impeachment effort, and so, it did not technically count as a deposition. The unnamed official argued that “contrary to what has been said, the chairman does not have the ability unilaterally to classify or declassify [an Intelligence Committee] transcript.”
Schiff’s office did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s multiple requests for comment about Atkinson’s closed-door testimony transcript, nor about why the 53 Russia investigation witness transcripts have not been released.
The 10 transcripts that Schiff blocked the White House from viewing and therefore stalled the declassification process on are 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 included 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 hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the campaign, were also among them.
One senior Trump administration official familiar with the declassification process told the Washington Examiner, “There is no excuse for Adam Schiff personally controlling the release of information that the Intelligence Committee voted 19 months ago to release and that the intelligence community has declassified.” The official said of Schiff: “If he was interested in transparency, as he has claimed, he would make all of these transcripts public.”
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee said they never expected it to take this long for the Russia investigation witness transcripts to be made public. In mid-September of 2018, then-Chairman Nunes told Fox News he hoped that, in the interest of “full transparency,” the transcripts would be released “in the next few weeks” and hopefully “before the election.”
In late September 2019, Schiff suggested to the House Intelligence Committee that he intended to release dozens of the transcripts.
“They have been released, yes. They have been returned to us with either redactions or with the attestation that there is nothing classified in them. There are, I think, a couple others that they have not returned to us, but they have said are unclassified, and since we possess them, it is our intention to release those as well,” Schiff said. Of the 10 transcripts in dispute, he added, “But all we are asking the ODNI is to tell us what is classified. So, we will be releasing them as expeditiously as we can when we get the redactions back.”
Schiff accused the White House of “hijacking” the process in an interview with Politico at the time, claiming that the 10 transcripts that the ODNI wanted the White House to be able to review, including two without classified information, had been held “hostage.” The report said that the “ODNI has returned 43 of the 53 transcripts to the committee with classified information redacted” and that “Schiff still intends to release the bulk of the Russia transcripts in the near future.”
This is not the first clash between Schiff and Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee. When Nunes led the committee in March 2018, it released a report on Russian interference concluding that Russia had interfered in the election but found no evidence of collusion. Schiff and the Democrats released their own report, arguing that Trump-Russia collusion was likely. In a brush over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Nunes argued government surveillance powers were abused to target the Trump campaign, while Schiff defended the FBI’s actions.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report, released in April 2019, found the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but “did not establish” any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
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 FISA 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.
U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was selected by Attorney General William Barr, recently expanded his investigative team as he looks into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation and reviews the actions taken by law enforcement figures and the intelligence community.
Recently declassified footnotes from the Horowitz report indicate the FBI was aware that a Russian disinformation campaign may have affected Steele’s dossier.
