The House intelligence committee investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged links with Moscow looks in danger of unravelling as a result of the unexplained behaviour of its chairman, Devin Nunes, a former Trump adviser. 
 
 
 
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 Such behaviour reportedly includes an unexplained disappearance from an Uber ride with a staffer on Tuesday night, described by his Democratic counterpart as a “peculiar midnight run”. 
 
 The investigation subsequently appeared to stall, with Nunes calling off a critical hearing scheduled for Tuesday 28 March, at a time when his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Adam Schiff, said he had seen more than circumstantial evidence of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia. 
 
 At an extraordinary committee hearing last Monday, the FBI director, James Comey, confirmed for the first time that the bureau was investigating Trump associates for possible collusion with Moscow. 
 
 At the hearing, Comey refused to name any of the campaign aides under FBI scrutiny. Schiff, the ranking Democrat, said he and Nunes had been given a classified briefing that involved evidence of collusion that “isn’t purely circumstantial”. 
 
 Schiff said he had persuaded Nunes to put in a joint request to Comey to share that evidence with the rest of the committee but said he did not know how the FBI director would respond. 
 
 Nunes, who served on Donald Trump’s transition team, subsequently put off the second hearing, which would have heard from former intelligence chiefs and a former deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump. 
 
 Nunes said he wanted to postpone the hearing to give the committee more time to confer with Comey and the National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers. Schiff, however, claimed the hearing had been cancelled to to “choke off public information” and avoid any more embarrassment to the White House. 
 
 Nunes has been under scrutiny over the past week for other reasons. He is reported to have gone missing on Tuesday night, under mysterious circumstances. The Daily Beast reported that Nunes received a message on his phone while travelling in a Uber car with a senior committee staffer in Washington, and then left the car abruptly without telling the staffer where he was going. 
 
 
 
 The next day he called a press conference, without telling his senior staff what he was going to say, and announced that he had seen “dozens” of intelligence reports that showed US intelligence agencies had “incidentally collected” material on members of the Trump transition team. 
 
 Such incidental collection happens when court-approved surveillance of an intelligence target picks up communications involving US persons who are not the formal target of the surveillance. 
 
 Nunes did not share the intelligence material he claimed to have seen with Democratic members of his committee, and instead outraged them further by briefing Trump. He said later: “I had a duty and obligation to tell him because, as you know, he’s taking a lot of heat in the news media.” 
 
 The president later said he felt “somewhat” vindicated in his repeated claims to have been the target of an Obama administration wiretap, even though those claims have been repudiated by Comey, intelligence chiefs and senior Republicans who said there was no evidence for them. 
 
 Schiff lambasted Nunes for failing to share the documents he said the committee chairman had gone to see in “this extraordinary and peculiar midnight run”. 
 
 “You don’t take information to the White House instead of your own committee if it purports to shed light on one of things we’re investigating,” Schiff told the San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that the whole incident was designed to provide political cover for Trump’s tweeted claims. 
 
 “It’s hard to have confidence if the chairman is going to be involved in that sort of conduct,” he said. 
 
 Nunes would not say who had shown him the documents – only that they were “legally brought to me by sources who thought that we should know it”. 
 
 Nunes’ Tuesday night foray to see possibly critical documents, his failure to share those documents with the committee, his decision to brief the president instead, and his abrupt cancellation of Tuesday’s hearing have all raised questions over whether the intelligence committee under his chairmanship can continue its inquiry into reported Russian intervention in the 2016 election with any credibility. 
 
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 “The chairman has to make a decision over whether he is a surrogate for the president, as he was during the campaign and transition, or whether he’s leading a bipartisan investigation,” Schiff told the Chronicle, “because he can’t do both. 
 
 “This week, unfortunately, he behaved like a surrogate and that is a real problem.” 
 
 The California Democrat, however, ruled out a boycott of the committee, arguing that would lead to the complete collapse of the investigation. 
 
 “If we were going to walk away and say the chairman is fatally compromised and we’re not going to participate, then none of this is going to get investigated by the House and that’s just not acceptable,” Schiff said. “So we’re going to soldier on.” 
 
 A separate Senate investigation is due to hold its first open hearing on the Russian role in the election on Thursday, but no serving officials will appear. 
 
 Schiff said Nunes’ behaviour added weight to calls from Democrats and a few Republicans for a special bipartisan commission to be created to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump camp’s possible involvement in it. ||||| House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on Wednesday said that his panel has not received any evidence that President Trump was wiretapped during the election campaign. 
 
 "As I told you last week about the issue with the president talking about tapping Trump Tower, that evidence still remains the same, that we don't have any evidence that that took place," Nunes told reporters. 
 
 "In fact, I don't believe just in the last week of time, the people we've talked to, I don't think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower." 
 
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 It is not the first time Nunes has stated that there is no evidence to suggest Trump was wiretapped. 
 
 In a series of tweets earlier this month, Trump leveled the explosive allegation that former President Obama had ordered surveillance of Trump's phone lines. Trump provided no evidence for his claim. 
 
 FBI Director James Comey urged the Justice Department to denounce Trump's statement because of a lack of evidence, but the agency has not done so. The Justice Department was expected to turn over to the House Intelligence Committee any information backing up Trump's claim by Monday. 
 
 White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday said Trump is "extremely confident" that the Justice Department will produce evidence to back up his assertion. He said Trump believes the evidence will “vindicate him.” 
 
 “I think there’s significant reporting about surveillance techniques that existed throughout the 2016 election,” Spicer said. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Benjy Sarlin 
 
 Several Democrats are expressing outrage after letters surfaced that they said suggested the White House tried to prevent former acting Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying before a House Intelligence Committee in its probe of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. 
 
 "It sounds like an effort to try and muzzle persons who have information and the ability to shed light on this investigation," Rep. Jackie Speier, D-California, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Tuesday. 
 
 White House officials deny such claims and say the administration never sought to block Yates from testifying. 
 
 White House press secretary Sean Spicer called the assertion "100 percent false" during Tuesday's press briefing. 
 
 "I hope she testifies," Spicer said adding he is "looking forward to it". 
 
 House Intelligence chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Califonia, also denied the claims and added that the committee still planned to question her at some point. 
 
 “Neither Chairman Nunes nor any Intelligence Committee staff members had any communication with the White House whatsoever about Sally Yates testifying to the Committee,” Nunes said in a statement. “The only person the Committee has spoken to about her appearing before the Committee has been her lawyer. The Committee asked her to testify on our own accord and we still intend to have her speak to us.” 
 
 Yates was fired by President Trump in January after refusing to defend the administration’s executive order barring travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. 
 
 Yates, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — all former Obama-administration appointees — were set to appear for public hearings on Tuesday on Russian interference in the 2016 election. 
 
 However, Nunes abruptly cancelled that session, over the objections of Democrats. Instead, FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers were asked to return to the Hill to testify in a closed session on that date. 
 
 Ultimately, that meeting, too, was cancelled due to a scheduling conflict and will be rescheduled. 
 
 Nunes has also scrapped the rest of the committee's meetings this week. 
 
 The House is currently investigating Russian influence on the election, but also possible ties between Russia and Trump associates, and the previous administration's use of surveillance, which President Trump asserted without evidence and against the testimony of top intelligence and justice officials had been used illegally to target Trump Tower. 
 
 Correspondences between Yates’ counsel David O’Neil, the committee’s chairman and ranking member, and the Justice Department obtained by NBC News and first published by the Washington Post show Yates requesting permission from the administration to speak at a hearing on Russian interference. 
 
 Read the letters 
 
 In a March 23 letter to Acting Assistant Attorney General Samuel Ramer, O’Neil wrote that Yates would not discuss classified information but that the guidance they received went further and was “overbroad, incorrect, and inconsistent with the department’s historical approach to the congressional testimony of current and former officials.” 
 
 Associate Deputy Attorney General Scott Schools responded that because Yates was seeking to testify on conversations she had with the White House Office of Counsel, the material would be covered by executive privilege and referred her to the White House. 
 
 He added she “need not obtain separate consent” from the Justice Department. 
 
 In a letter to White House counsel Donald McGahn on March 24, O’Neil said any guidance barring Yates from discussing conversations about an unnamed senior White House official would be “untenable” and that the relevant topics had already been discussed publicly by top officials. 
 
 Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the cancelled hearing would have enabled members to question Yates about the lead-up to the president’s decision to fire former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn over conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that he failed to disclose to Vice President Mike Pence. He speculated that the White House may have been involved in the decision to block the meeting. 
 
 “We are aware that former AG Yates intended to speak on these matters, and sought permission to testify from the White House,” Schiff said. “Whether the White House's desire to avoid a public claim of executive privilege to keep her from providing the full truth on what happened contributed to the decision to cancel today's hearing, we do not know.” 
 
 Spicer denied that claim and called the Washington Post story “false.” 
 
 “The White House has taken no action to prevent Sally Yates from testifying and the Department of Justice specifically told her that it would not stop her and to suggest otherwise is completely irresponsible,” Spicer told NBC News. 
 
 White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted that O’Neil’s last letter to McGahn, dated March 24, said they would conclude the administration had not asserted executive privilege over the topics in question if they heard no response by Monday, March 27 at 10 AM. 
 
 “We took NO action, therefore not blocking her,” Sanders said. 
 
 The back-and-forth is the latest sign of tension between the White House, Nunes, and Democrats, some of whom have called for Nunes to step down from the investigation after he revealed he had met with a source at the White House before telling reporters that intelligence agencies may have incidentally monitored the president and his aides’ communications.
– FBI Director James Comey testifies before the House Intelligence Committee on Monday and there may be some angry tweets from the White House soon afterward: Comey is widely expected to tell lawmakers that there is no evidence to support President Trump's claim that former President Obama had him wiretapped, CNN reports. Rep. Devin Nunes, the committee's GOP chairman, said Sunday that documents received from the Justice Department on Friday indicated there was no wiretapping, the Washington Post reports. "Was there a physical wiretap of Trump Tower? No, but there never was, and the information we got on Friday continues to lead us in that direction," he told Fox. Nunes also called for an investigation of leaks to the news media, reports Reuters. The hearing, scheduled from 10am to 1pm, will focus on allegations of Russian interference in last year's election, and Nunes say he has seen no evidence of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign. Comey is expected to be asked to confirm or deny the existence of Russia-related criminal investigations of Trump or his staffers, reports Politico, which notes that he might decline to comment to avoid jeopardizing active investigations, a move that would bring accusations of hypocrisy from Democrats still angry about Comey's decision to release information on the Hillary Clinton email investigation days before the election.