House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said on Monday that there is exculpatory evidence in classified documents regarding former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page that the FBI should have included in its FISA applications and those documents still need to be declassified.
“There is exculpatory evidence that we have seen of classified documents that need to be declassified,” Nunes said. “The judges should have been presented with this exculpatory evidence that the FBI and DOJ had,” he added.
Nunes appeared on Fox News’s “Hannity” Monday evening to discuss the latest developments in the FISA abuse scandal. He and other Republicans have been pressing President Trump to declassify 20 pages of the FBI’s FISA warrant so the American people can see it for themselves.
The congressman said on Fox News last week that the American people would be shocked by what is in those 20 redacted pages.
He also told Hannity that Bruce Ohr, a former top official at the Department of Justice, will become a “more and more important” figure in what has become known as SpyGate, and urged investigative journalists to start digging into his role in the Obama era scandal.
“I think people should pay close attention to it,” the California Republican said.
Nunes was referring to findings that suggest Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the Trump dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign, kept supplying allegations to the FBI after the 2016 election, even though by that point he was terminated as a source by the bureau for giving confidential information to the media.
Congressional investigators have found that Ohr, who was the fourth-highest ranking official in the Justice Department, acted as an intermediary between Steele after he was terminated as a source and the FBI’s investigation into ties between the Russians and President Trump’s 2016 campaign. When Ohr gave the bureau information from Steele, agents made a record of it, and those records are in the form of so-called 302 reports, in which the FBI agents write up notes of interviews during an investigation.
Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, was employed by Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that was hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign to find dirt on then-candidate Trump.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told the FBI and Justice Department in a July letter that there is “no continuing justification for the FBI to keep the documents secret.”
Nunes said the Democrats were in on the conspiracy against Trump from the beginning and so was the media.
“The media in 2016 had all this information too. So they know that this information was being generated by the Clinton campaign,” he said.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member