Senate Intelligence Leaders Say House GOP Leaked a Senator’s Texts

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee were behind the leak of private text messages between the Senate panel’s top Democrat and a Russian-connected lawyer, according to two congressional officials briefed on the matter.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, were so perturbed by the leak that they demanded a rare meeting with Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., last month to inform him of their findings. They used the meeting with Ryan to raise broader concerns about the direction of the House Intelligence Committee under its chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., 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.

The messages between Warner and Adam Waldman, a Washington lawyer, show that the senator tried for weeks to arrange a meeting with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who assembled a dossier of salacious claims about connections between Trump, his associates and Russia. The Senate committee has had difficulty making contact with Steele, whom it views as a key witness. And Waldman, who knew Steele, presented himself as a willing partner.

The texts were leaked just days after the same House Republicans had taken the extraordinary step of publicly releasing, over the objections of the FBI, a widely disputed memorandum based on sensitive government secrets. Taken together, the actions suggested a pattern of partisanship and unilateral action by the once-bipartisan House panel.

Fox News published the texts, which were sent via a secure messaging application, in early February. President Donald Trump and other Republicans loyal to him quickly jumped on the report to try to discredit Warner, suggesting that the senator was acting surreptitiously to try to talk with Steele.

“Wow! -Senator Mark Warner got caught having extensive contact with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch,” Trump wrote at the time. “Warner did not want a ‘paper trail’ on a ‘private’ meeting (in London) he requested with Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame.”

“All tied into Crooked Hillary,” Trump added.

The Fox News article made prominent mention of work by Waldman’s Washington lobbying firm on behalf of Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate who was once close to Paul Manafort, Trump’s indicted former campaign chairman.

Copies of the messages were originally submitted by Waldman to the Senate committee. In January, one of Nunes’ staff members requested that copies be shared with the House committee as well, according to a person familiar with the request who was not authorized to talk about it publicly. Days later, the messages were published by Fox News, the person said. Fox’s report said that it had obtained the documents from a Republican source it did not name.

The documents published by Fox News appear to back up the senators’ accusation. Though they were marked “CONFIDENTIAL: Produced to USSSCI on a Confidential Basis,” suggesting that they had come from the Senate panel, known as the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the person familiar with the congressional requests said the stamp was misleading and other markings gave away their actual origin.

Specifically, the copy of the messages shared with the Senate had page numbers, and the one submitted to the House — while preserving the reference to the Senate committee — did not.

A lawyer for Waldman independently concluded that the House committee had probably shared the document and sent a letter to Nunes complaining about the leak, according to a person familiar with the letter.

Burr appeared to make a veiled reference to the texts 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 OK, because you know and we know the security measures we’ve got in place to protect the sensitivity of that material.”

In a statement, a spokesman for Nunes, Jack Langer, did not dispute that the committee had leaked the messages, but called the premise of this article “absurd.”

“The New York Times, a prominent purveyor of leaks, is highlighting anonymous sources leaking information that accuses Republicans of leaking information,” he said. “I’m not sure if this coverage could possibly get more absurd.”

AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Ryan, released a statement after this article was published, saying, "The speaker heard the senators on their concerns and encouraged them to take them up directly with their counterparts.”

In his meeting with the senators, Ryan told them he did not run the committee himself, the officials briefed on the encounter said.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were briefed on their conclusions in recent weeks and on the meeting with Ryan.

In a joint statement, Burr and Warner acknowledged the meeting with Ryan and said they had not requested that the speaker take any specific action.

Waldman, the lawyer who communicated with Warner, could not be reached for comment. The incident makes clear just how far the two intelligence committees — generally considered secretive refuges from the politics of Capitol Hill — have diverged over the course of their Russia investigations.

In the House, Republicans and Democrats have been consumed by partisan sniping, airing grievances on television and in the press, while the pace of witness interviews has slowed to a crawl. Democrats have repeatedly accused Nunes of using his position to protect Trump from the investigation.

The House committee spent much of the last month locked in a bitter dispute over the secret Republican memorandum, which accused top FBI and Justice Department officials of abusing their powers to spy on one of Trump’s former campaign advisers. Republicans released the document over the objections of the Justice Department and the FBI, which warned in a rare public statement that it was dangerously misleading.

Democrats called the document reckless and said it was merely a political tool to tarnish the agencies investigating Trump’s potential ties to Russia. They eventually released their own memo, drawn from the same underlying material, rebutting it.

The Senate committee has conducted its investigation primarily in private, and Burr and Warner remained in lock step both publicly and privately. When Fox News published Warner’s texts, for example, an aide to Burr told the network that he had been aware of Warner’s contacts with Waldman, and the two senators issued a joint statement condemning the leak.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., another member of the Intelligence Committee, also defended Warner.

And while Nunes’ memo consumed Republicans in the House, as well as officials in the White House, Burr largely steered clear of it. He told CNN it ought not to have been released, and in private he discounted it.

In the hearing with intelligence chiefs last month, he sought to draw a distinction between his committee’s approach and that of the House.

“I promised you when we started a year ago that the sensitive nature of that material would, in fact, be protected,” he said. “The vice chairman and I have done everything in our power to do that.”