House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday called Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’s (R-Calif.) behavior regarding the panel’s ongoing Russia investigation “bizarre.”
Speaking on NBC’s “Today” show, Pelosi said she had “never seen behavior this bizarre on the part of the chairman.”
Nunes, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has come under fire in recent weeks for communications with the White House that critics have deemed inappropriate.
Nunes last week bypassed committee members to visit the White House and brief Trump on classified intelligence reports that he said showed members of Trump’s transition team had been swept up in incidental surveillance after the 2016 election. Trump used that information to support his unsubstantiated claims from early March that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower. On Thursday, however, reports surfaced that three White House officials had helped provide the intelligence documents to Nunes.
“Whether the president was aware or not is one thing — the Trump administration certainly was, and it is very bizarre,” Pelosi said.
Some have questioned whether Nunes, as the head of a congressional committee investigating some of Trump’s associates, is remaining impartial.
“We really have to take some steps back and hope that in the administration there are some adults someplace who can say this is not fair to the American people,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi also said that since some of the intelligence about government surveillance under the Obama administration came from the Trump White House, Nunes was possibly being tricked into parroting Trump’s message that he was wiretapped.
“He was duped,” Pelosi said. “That’s the most innocent, most benign characterization, that he was duped, but he should have known better, when you’re the chairman of the committee.”
