In the aftermath of FBI Director James Comey's testimony on Monday, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told MSNBC's Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday that a special congressional committee needs to be appointed to investigate connections between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials.
McCain's statements came just as CNN reported that the FBI may have information on Trump's associates' interactions with Russian operatives to politically harm Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Carl Bernstein, best known for working with Bob Woodward to expose the Watergate scandal that took down President Richard Nixon in 1974, told CNN on Wednesday that "I’ve been saying for a while that there’s a coverup going on here. The coverup is among those who worked in the Trump campaign and associates of Trump and it’s now becoming much more clear what it is that they have been concealing which are these contacts, which revolve around leaked emails from [Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta's account."
"It's a bizarre situation," McCain told Van Susteren. "I think that this back and forth and what the American people have found so far is that no longer does Congress have the credibility to handle this alone."
McCain's comment about congressional credibility referred to a public feud between the House Intelligence Committee's two ranking members, Devin Nunes, a Republican, and Adam Schiff, a Democrat.
On Wednesday Nunes told reporters that he had personally visited the White House to inform President Trump that the intelligence community had "incidentally collected" communications from both members of Trump's transition team and possibly Trump himself as part of a larger surveillance project.
"What I've read bothers me, and I think it should bother the president himself and his team because I think some of it seems to be inappropriate," Nunes told reporters. Trump said that he felt "somewhat" vindicated by Nunes' reports.
In response to Nunes' actions, Schiff told MSNBC's Chuck Todd that "it's simply not possible to do a credible investigation if you take information that's pertinent to the scope of what you're investigating and bring it to the White House instead of bring it to your own committee."
McCain characterized the Nunes-Schiff dispute as "a tremendous chasm between the two senior members of the House Intelligence Committee.
He added, "There is no substantiation for what Chairman Nunes said, nor is there substantiation for what Congressman Schiff said."
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