A day after voting to release a classified memo about intelligence gathering authored by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) — but against releasing a rebuttal from the committee’s ranking minority member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — one Congressman took to Fox News to pretend the majority had acted in a bipartisan and transparent fashion.
Brad Wenstrup, a third-term Ohio congressman and one of the 13 Republicans on the 23-member House Select Committee on Intelligence, told America’s Newsroom on Tuesday that he had voted to release the “top secret” memo by Nunes — despite warnings from Donald Trump’s own Department of Justice that doing so would be “extraordinarily reckless” — because “we thought it was time for the American people and at least our colleagues to start with to see what has been going on in the government.” The committee had earlier made the document available to members of the House, though Nunes had refused to share it with the Senate Intelligence Committee or federal law enforcement.
He then pretended that the Republican majority had acted magnanimously in voting not to make Schiff’s response public, but letting members of the GOP-lead House take a look at it.
“We want the American people to have eyes on [the Nunes memo] so they have some idea of what we’ve been dealing with,” Wenstrup told host Bill Hemmer. “And I will say this, Bill, we voted unanimously. Although the Democrats voted against us releasing this memo to our colleagues, we voted unanimously to let their memo go to our colleagues. We’re trying to be fair, professional, informative, transparent, and get to the truth.”
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In addition to leading the committee, Nunes was a member of Trump’s presidential transition team. His memo reportedly relies on cherry-picked details from other classified documents and presents a misleading picture of intelligence gathering as it related to the 2016 Trump campaign. Schiff’s memo purportedly explains how — but thanks to Wenstrup and the committee’s majority, the transparency and fairness will be limited to just one side’s view.