Top Dem calls for investigation into House Intelligence chairman

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) on Thursday called for an investigation into House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who bypassed the panel to brief President Trump on information related to U.S. surveillance of his transition team.

During an interview on CNN’s “New Day,” Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, called the Intelligence panel a “very special committee.”

“They are privileged to information that most members of Congress may never see and so you expect them to be extremely confidential,” he added.

“What he did was basically to go to the president, who’s being investigated, by the FBI and others and by the intelligence committee, to give them information.”

.@repcummings calls for investigation into House Intelligence Chair @DevinNunes for briefing POTUS before House Dems https://t.co/rflYKrvcSH

— New Day (@NewDay) March 23, 2017

{mosads}Nunes on Wednesday said he had learned from a source that the U.S. intelligence community incidentally collected information on members of Trump’s transition team and then “widely disseminated” the information internally.

Democrats on the committee were blindsided, as were many Republicans. By the end of the day Wednesday, Nunes was still the only committee member to have seen the intelligence in question, according to the Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), committee’s top Democrat.

The move outraged Democrats and threatened to plunge the committee into open partisan warfare.

Cummings told CNN that Nunes “put a cloud over his own investigation.” 

“And he has become the subject basically, he should be, of an investigation. It’s a real problem.”