Republicans Skip Hearing as Impeachment Ill Will Reverberates

(Bloomberg) -- House Republicans boycotted an Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday as a hangover of bitter feelings over President Donald Trump’s impeachment continues to roil Congress.

Representative Devin Nunes, the panel’s ranking Republican, complained in a letter to Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff that under his leadership the committee “has strayed far from its mandate of overseeing the intelligence community.”

The Democratic-run Intelligence Committee was central to the investigation that led to Trump’s impeachment by the House, and Schiff, a California Democrat, was the lead prosecutor during the Senate trial. Although Nunes doesn’t mention the impeachment fight, he wrote that “it is concerning that you prioritize publicity events rather than the more productive work that occurs in the committee’s classified space.”

The letter also was signed by Representative Chris Stewart, the top Republican on the subcommittee on Strategic Technology and Advanced Research that is holding the hearing “on the potential uses of next-generation technology for U.S. national security.”

In addition to hard feelings over Trump’s impeachment, Republicans were angered that Schiff included in the trial evidence phone records showing that Nunes had been in contact with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his indicted associate Lev Parnas at the same time the former New York mayor was trying to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine.

“We hope this committee can move past political investigations and publicity stunts and get back to the important work we have traditionally taken on a bipartisan basis,” the Republicans’ letter said.

Representative Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the Intelligence subcommittee, said that was the real reason Republicans were boycotting the hearing. He said Republicans previously cited the feud over the phone records as prompting the boycott.

“This letter is a reversal of what I was told last week,” Himes said Wednesday. He called the explanation from Nunes and Stewart “as wrong-headed as it is mendacious.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Joe Sobczyk, Laurie Asséo

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