One of the more shocking revelations to come out of fired FBI director James Comey’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos was his admission that he didn’t bother to tell the president that the dirty dossier was funded by Democrats when he briefed President Trump on the salacious and unverified material. Comey explained that “it wasn’t necessary” for his “goal.”
But it gets worse. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, (R-Calif.) on Tuesday revealed on Fox News’ “Hannity” that Comey didn’t bother to inform the Republican members of the United States Congress of that inconvenient information, either. Nunes said that if Comey had told them that the Hillary Clinton campaign was behind the dossier in early 2017, he would have “spit up his coffee” and “walked out of there.”
Nunes said he was in a meeting with Senator McConnell and House Speaker Ryan and many others when then-director Comey briefed them about the anti-Trump dossier and “he had ample opportunity in early 2017 to tell us who paid for the dossier.”
“We knew it wasn’t verified at the time because they told us that it wasn’t verified,” Nunes said.
He added that if Comey had told them on that day that the dossier was paid for by the Democratic Party, “I would have spit up my coffee and started laughing.” He added that “we would have walked out of there. We would have said, ‘what in the hell are you guys doing? You’re bringing us dirt that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for. You guys have been using this and you’re now presenting it to us as to why you have concerns about the Trump campaign?’ This would have been laughable at the time.”
Hannity called it the “biggest abuse of power” that he’d ever seen in his life.
Nunes also found it curious that according to Comey, campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was the impetus for the counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign because they had “concerns” about him after he drunkenly told an Australian diplomat in a London bar that Russia had dirt on Hillary.
Ambassador Alexander Downer allegedly told the FBI about the conversation and that became the official reason the FBI opened the Russia counterintelligence probe. It should be noted that Downer has ties to the Clintons and previously arranged one of the largest foreign donations to their charitable efforts, according to John Solomon at The Hill.
Nunes noted that the counterintelligence probe began in July of 2016. “Well why is it that you never bothered to talk to Mr. Papadopoulos, but you did bother to go and get a FISA warrant on Mr. Page in October of ’16. You don’t talk to Papadopoulos until 2017? Well, wait a second — I thought Papadopoulos was the reason you started the investigation in the first place!” he said.
Nunes also slammed Comey for saying it was possible that the Russians have dirt on President Trump.
“It’s ‘certainly possible’ that the Russians could have dirt on Comey,” Nunes argued.
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