Schiff accuses Nunes of making secret changes to classified memo before White House review

Rep. Devin Nunes “secretly altered” a classified and controversial memo about secret surveillance during the 2016 presidential campaign before he sent it to the White House for review, Rep. Adam B. Schiff said Wednesday night.

Nunes (R-Tulare) chairs the House Intelligence Committee and Schiff (D-Burbank) is the ranking Democrat on the panel.

In a letter to Nunes, Schiff wrote that “material changes” were made to the four-page classified document that members of Congress were able to read before the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines Monday to release it.

The vote sent the memo to the White House, giving President Trump five days to decide whether to object to its release. The president has signaled that the document should be made public, but Schiff said the process needs to restart.

“The White House has … been reviewing a document since Monday night that the Committee never approved for public release,” Schiff wrote in his letter.

He did not say precisely what had changed in the memo, or why it was significant. A senior Democratic committee official who was not authorized to speak publicly said the changes are “not cosmetic” and appeared to “water down” some of the Republicans’ conclusions.

Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, described Schiff’s letter as part of an “increasingly strange attempt” to prevent the document’s release. He said the changes include “minor edits to the memo, including grammatical fixes and two edits requested by the FBI and by the Minority themselves.”

Schiff’s accusation was the latest twist in the saga over the memo, which has become one of the more hotly contested sideshows to the special counsel investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign.

Republicans say the classified document reveals improper surveillance and other FBI abuses, but Democrats and top law enforcement officials have accused them of skewing the facts for partisan purposes.

On Wednesday, the FBI warned that it had “grave concerns” about the accuracy of the memo, creating an unusual clash with the White House.

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