House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said Sunday that it was “sickening” that Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) had obtained his phone records as part of the House’s impeachment inquiry.
“I think the whole thing is just sickening, but he did it to one of my current staff members and one of my former staff members who he doesn’t like,” Nunes said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”
{mosads}Nunes also denied having worked with President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to get former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired, telling Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, “If I wanted an ambassador fired, I’d pick up the phone, and I’d call the president. And I’m quite sure the president would take my call, and I’m quite sure the president would probably listen to me.”
“I would have no reason to work it through staff, work it through people I don’t know, work it through Rudy Giuliani. The whole thing is absurd on its face,” he added.
Nunes said the release raised questions of whether “just one member because he doesn’t like someone and he’s a political opponent of someone, can that member just subpoena records and then release just to embarrass or to create a distraction or to build whatever fantasyland narrative that they continue to build?”
Schiff has denied subpoenaing Nunes’s phone records. Addressing the pushback over obtaining the records on Sunday, Schiff told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that “the blowback has only come from the far right.”
“Every investigator seeks phone records to corroborate, sometimes to contradict, a witness’s testimony,” Schiff said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”