House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes "has destroyed the credibility" of the panel and turned it "into a joke," MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell said on Monday, according to The Hill.
Mitchell, who also serves as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News, made the comment after being asked by "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough if Republican senators in the Senate were being as reckless as their counterparts in the House regarding a secret Republican memo.
Mitchell responded that they were not as reckless, but then offered scathing criticism.
"You also do not hear them suggesting that if [special counsel Robert] Mueller were fired, or [Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein, which could be more significant because he is overseeing Mueller's investigation, that they would take action," she said. "It's a real softening of the backbone, the spine, in the Senate as well."
Mitchell added that the GOP senators are also "not commenting on Nunes and this memo at all. They're considering it a House problem. And Nunes was cleared by the Ethics Committee on that unmasking probe, so that gave him the leeway, he believes and his supporters believe, to jump right back in."
She continued that Nunes, a Republican, "never stopped issuing subpoenas and interfering with the probe, according to critics on the House Intelligence Committee, and this has destroyed the credibility of the House Intelligence Committee."
Mitchell concluded that "The fact that Sens. [Mark] Warner (D-Virginia) and [Richard] Burr (R-North Carolina) are working so closely together on the Senate side, for the most part, has at least preserved that committee, but the House Intelligence Committee, frankly, is a joke, despite the efforts of [Democratic] Rep. Adam Schiff and others, [Democratic] Rep. [Eric] Swalwell and others, to preserve their investigative work."