Schiff: WH owes me an apology for saying I selectively leak to press

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Thursday that the White House owes him an apology after press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused him of leaking House Intelligence Committee interviews to the press.

“They owe me an apology, but frankly it would be a wasted errand to ask for one,” Schiff said on CNN. “And if Sarah Huckabee Sanders is going to have to give out apologies to everyone that he has criticized unfairly, she would be doing nothing else all day.”

Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sanders’s claim that he selectively leaked witness interviews to reporters was false, and insisted that he does not discuss details of investigative interviews.

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“The only exception I make is when people refuse to answer questions because I don’t let them hide behind a closed session and then leave the room and say, ‘we cooperated fully,’ ” Schiff said.

In a press briefing Thursday, Sanders suggested that Schiff and other Democratic lawmakers were trying to influence investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election by leaking information to the press, including witness interviews.

“Frankly, the only people we’ve seen trying to influence the investigation are former [FBI] Director [James] Comey and Democrats in Congress,” she said. “And that would include Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein [D-Calif.] and Rep. Schiff, who have both selectively leaked to the media witness interviews.”

Sanders’s comments came two days after Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, released the transcript of a closed-door interview with the co-founder of the firm that commissioned a controversial opposition research dossier on President Trump during the 2016 campaign.