Republican lead Russiagate investigator asked to step down after secret visit to White House grounds comes to light

The storm around House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) intensified Monday after it was revealed that he secretly visited the White House grounds the day before announcing incidental surveillance of President Trump’s transition team.

Nunes struggled to provide an explanation for the unusual trip on Monday even as Democrats demanded that he step aside as leader of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

The visit raised questions about whether the White House itself was the source of the mysterious intelligence that Nunes, but no one else on Capitol Hill, has seen. Nunes has vowed to protect his source while offering contradictory descriptions of what the documents reveal.

The White House provided little clarity, directing all inquiries to the chairman himself. Since the Trump White House does not make visitor logs public, it remains unclear whom Nunes met with or who let him into the secure facility in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to remove Nunes as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, while the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee called the trip “more than suspicious.” The committee’s ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), called for Nunes to recuse himself from the panel’s Russia investigation.

On Tuesday, Nunes reportedly climbed into an Uber, leaving staff members behind, and went to the White House grounds to view classified information brought to his attention by a source.

The next morning, without looping in the top Democrat on his committee, Nunes stepped up to microphones and said he had seen classified information that exposed widely disseminated intelligence collected incidentally — and legally — on Trump transition team members. Nunes served as a member of the Trump transition team’s executive committee.

The chairman briefed Ryan on his findings that morning, but committee Democrats — and many Republicans — were left in the dark.

Then, that afternoon, Nunes returned to the White House to brief Trump on what he had learned.

The strange sequence of events has roiled the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the election. Nunes has claimed that his findings had no relevance to the Russia probe, yet the committee is examining the unmasking and leaking of surveillance information as part of that investigation.