Remember when those private texts surfaced between Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and a Russian-linked lawyer Warner was seeking information from related to his work on the Senate Intelligence Committee? Well, the leaders of the Senate panel—Warner and Republican Richard Burr—have concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence panel, led by White House errand boy Devin Nunes, leaked those texts to Fox News in an effort to smear the legitimacy of the Senate panel's work. The New York Times writes:
Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan last month to inform him of their findings. They used the meeting with Mr. Ryan to raise broader concerns about the direction of the House Intelligence Committee under its chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, the officials said.
To the senators, who are overseeing what is effectively the last bipartisan investigation on Capitol Hill into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the leak was a serious breach of protocol and a partisan attack by one intelligence committee against the other. [...]
Fox News published the text messages, which were sent via a secure messaging application, in early February. President Trump and other Republicans loyal to him quickly jumped on the report to try to discredit Mr. Warner, suggesting that the senator was acting surreptitiously to try to talk with the former British spy who assembled a dossier of salacious claims about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia.
Gee, the House Intelligence panel engaging in excessively partisan conspiratorial behavior to insulate Trump from the Russia probe—who woulda thunk it? On the other hand, the notion that the GOP-led Senate Intelligence panel was heading up an effort to tamp down the partisan hackery of the GOP-led House Intelligence panel is pretty extraordinary. And no surprise, Paul Ryan did nothing to rein in the traitorous actions of Nunes.
Mr. Burr appeared to make a veiled reference to the text messages during a public hearing with the heads of the government’s intelligence agencies last month.
“There have been times where information has found its way out, some of it recent, where it didn’t come from us, but certainly people have portrayed it did,” he said. “And that’s O.K., because you know and we know the security measures we’ve got in place to protect the sensitivity of that material.” [...]
AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ryan, declined to comment. In his meeting with the senators, Mr. Ryan made clear that he heard their complaints but noted that he did not run the committee himself, the officials briefed on the encounter said.
Has anyone proven less capable of providing actual leadership than Paul Ryan? Pathetic.
Those texts, by the way, surfaced just days after House Republicans released the Nunes memo against the vehement warnings of both the FBI and the Department of Justice.