House Intel Committee Asks John Brennan, James Tapper, Sally Yates To Testify Publicly On Trump/Russia

Business Insider reports:

The House Intelligence Committee announced on Friday that it had extended invitations to three former officials with knowledge of Russia’s interference in the US election to testify in an open hearing in May, over a month after the committee’s chairman first scrapped the session.

“Yesterday, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence sent two letters related to its investigation into Russian active measures during the 2016 election campaign,” Emily Hytha, a spokesperson for Republican Rep. Mike Conaway, wrote on Friday.

“The first letter was sent to FBI Director James Comey and National Security Advisor Admiral Mike Rogers, inviting them to appear at a closed hearing on May 2, 2017,” Hytha wrote. “The second letter was sent to former CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates inviting them to appear at an open hearing to be scheduled after May 2nd.”

More from Talking Points Memo:

Those officials were initially scheduled to come before the committee in March. But Nunes scrapped their appearances after going public with claims that he’d seen intelligence reports that showed information about President Donald Trump and his staffers was “incidentally collected,” and Nunes asserted that the identities of those persons were inappropriately unmasked in the reports.

Other lawmakers from both parties who later viewed the same reports said the documents showed no evidence of wrongdoing. At the time of the cancelations, Schiff charged that Nunes was trying to “choke off” public information about the Russia probe.