Judicial Watch Investigating Reps. Schiff & Speier /Regarding
Classified Info, By PolitiChicks, 4/17/17 Press
release from Judicial Watch:
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today sent a
hand-delivered letter to the chairman and co-chairman of the House Office of
Congressional Ethics calling for an investigation into whether Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-CA) and Jackie Speier (D-CA) “disclosed classified information to the public
in violation of House ethics rules.”
Citing the ethics complaints filed against House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) charging that he “may have
made unauthorized disclosures of classified information, in violation of House
Rules, regulations, or other standards of conduct,” Judicial Watch wrote:
If the standard for filing a complaint or opening
an ethics investigation is that a member has commented publicly on matters that
touch on classified information, but the member does not reveal the source of
his or her information, then the complaints against Chairman Nunes are
incomplete insofar as they target only Nunes. At least two other members of the
House Intelligence Committee have made comments about classified material that
raise more directly the very same concerns raised against Chairman Nunes
because they appear to confirm classified information contained in leaked
intelligence community intercepts.
On March 21, 2017, the Ranking Member of the House
Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff spoke to an audience at the Brookings
Institute in which he commented on an intelligence community intercept of a
December 29, 2016 conversation between Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislayak and
retired U.S. Army General Michael Flynn, who had been selected by
then-President Elect Donald Trump to serve as National Security Advisor. Both
the fact of the conversation and the conversation’s contents were leaked to the
news media and reported widely. In his Brookings Institute speech, Rep. Schiff
stated:
And then you have leaks that expose malfeasance or
illegality. Now, I put that kind of leak, I put the Flynn leak in that
category. And what was most disturbing to me, frankly, about that was: here you
had a situation where the president is informed that his national security
advisor . . . has lied to the vice president, and probably others . . . about a
conversation with the Russians over sanctions imposed over hacking in the
election to help the president.
Likewise,
an April 3, 2017 report in the Daily Caller quotes Representative Jackie Speier
as commenting publicly on both the contents of the Kislayak-Flynn conversations
and Flynn’s subsequent “unmasking” as a U.S. person incidentally intercepted by
the intelligence community:
Now, if in fact, it was unmasked and if it was
General Flynn. You have to understand the context in which it was unmasked. We
do know that. Ambassador Kislayak and General Flynn were freelancing sanctions
relief at the end of December, when he had no portfolio in which to make any
kind of negotiations with Ambassador Kislayak.” [Emphasis added]
Like
Rep. Schiff, Rep. Speier did not disclose how she knew about the conversation
between Ambassador Kislayak and General Flynn or about General Flynn’s
“unmasking,” but the statement attributed to her also appears to confirm the
contents of leaked, classified information.
Judicial
Watch concludes by asking “the Office of Congressional Ethics conduct a
preliminary investigation into whether Rep. Schiff and Rep. Speier disclosed
classified information to the public in violation of House ethics rules.”
“At
least two leading Democrats, Reps. Schiff and Speier, on the House Intelligence
Committee seem to have improperly disclosed classified information,” said
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “While the Ethics Committee examines Rep.
Nunes’s innocuous statements on Obama’s surveillance on the Trump team, it
ought to expand its investigation to include the other members of the
Intelligence Committee who seem to have flagrantly violated the rules.”
http://politichicks.com/2017/04/judicial-watch-investigating-reps-schiff-speier-regarding-classified-info/
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