House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on Fox News’ Hannity Wednesday night to give an update on his committee’s efforts to obtain declassified memos from the Justice Department and FBI.
President Trump on Monday ordered the declassification of the Carter Page FISA application and the public release of “all text messages relating to the Russia investigation, without redaction, of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.”
While the FBI and DOJ are reportedly stalling, congressional Democrats and former Obama officials are going on TV to argue that declassification will expose crucial methods and sources.
“That’s not true,” Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson earlier Wednesday night. “It’s demonstrated in prior releases not to be true,” he added, pointing out that the FISA warrant applications that were partially declassified last February showed corruption and malfeasance on the part of Obama officials — not national security secrets.
“This is not complicated,” Nunes declared. “We have seen most of this information and in terms of the FISA, it’s only 20 pages. All you have to do is make a copy and send it out, put it on the internet. At this point, I do not understand why this hasn’t been declassified. The president said ‘declassify immediately without redactions.'”
Nunes denied that there were any national security concerns in the documents.
“We’ve heard this same story over and over again,” he argued. “The same people that are out there that are running around saying ‘Oh, there’s national security concerns with this, we’re going to reveal some sources and methods’ happen to the same people who are involved.”
The Intel chairman added: “They’re either covering up for their agency, or they are involved. And that’s totally unacceptable.”
Nunes explained that it was important to get the information out to the American people because they have been “force-fed this Russian Kool-Aid… for two years.”
When asked about the notorious “insurance policy” fired FBI agent Peter Strzok referred to in an August 2016 email, he answered, “A lot of people believe that that was the FISA itself on Carter Page. We actually don’t believe that. We believe they were very concerned about the dossier. We believe they know they were trying to snooker the FISA court and fool the judges and they needed something else,” he explained, adding, “James Comey has called it a mosaic of facts. Well, we need to see the rest of those facts, and that’s what we want released.”
Nunes told Hannity that many laws were broken in the process of trying to find dirt on Trump and that he doesn’t know how the DOJ and FBI can investigate themselves because they are all implicated in the FISA-Gate scandal.
He made another point about the redacted emails. “You don’t get to send out classified information on your cell phone. It’s not classified. If it’s classified, then right there and then they should be held accountable because they broke the law if they were sending classified information over cell phones,” he pointed out. “That should be declassified immediately,” he added.
“Many news reporters have now said that they are stalling. The people within the DOJ and FBI are stalling on purpose,” the congressman concluded.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member