Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on Sunday said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office must be embarrassed that they had to come to House Republicans for information they could use to indict Roger Stone on a process crime, and predicted that the “process of discovery” in the case will be a “fascinating” one.
“I think the Mueller investigation is really at the bottom of the barrel when they’re looking at people like this because we already found in our report that Roger Stone wasn’t colluding with the Russians, which, that was the original intent of all this, remember?” Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo.
“Supposedly Trump campaign operatives, so-called, were colluding with Russians,” Nunes added. “They must be embarrassed that they actually have to come to House Republicans in order to have us give them the information, the transcripts so that they go and get Roger Stone on a process foul that occurred in 2017 that Roger Stone himself is going to fight. The process of discovery is going to be fascinating in this case and I can’t wait to watch it.”
Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser, was arrested during an early morning FBI raid at his house in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Friday and indicted on charges of obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
During an interview following his arrest, Stone said that he would not be pressured to bear false witness against the president. “I intend to fight because this indictment is fabricated,” he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Friday evening. “This indictment is thin as can be. My attorneys are highly confident that they can win an acquittal if I can get a fair trial in the District of Columbia.”
Stone also told Carlson that the feds had been surveilling his email, text messages, and phone calls for two years, possibly longer, “because the New York Times reported on January 20, 2017, that I was among three people in the Trump campaign under active surveillance.”
He added, “Hopefully we’ll learn something about that in discovery of this case.”
During the interview with Bartiromo, Nunes accused the Obama administration of using the intelligence services of the United States to improperly target the Trump campaign.
He pointed out that the FBI opened up the investigation based on the Clinton-funded Steele dossier at the end of July in 2016 while the presidential campaigns were in full swing.
“At the same time, Bruce Ohr, the top career official in the Department of Justice, is acting like some kind of secret agent meeting with this Clinton oppo guy [former British spy Christopher Steele] who’s digging up dirt,” Nunes explained, adding that Ohr took custody of this information and fed it “directly into the FBI and DOJ.”
He noted dryly that he was pleased to see the DOJ finally taking lying to Congress seriously after watching high-ranking Obama officials get away with it for so many years.
“I’m happy that now DOJ is going to take seriously lying to Congress. They’re going to go after Roger Stone for lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation,” the congressman said. “They need to start with themselves. They need to start with the former leadership of the Department of Justice and the FBI.”
He suggested that the DOJ “start with [Peter] Strzok and [Lisa] Page,” the two FBI investigators who hated Trump and who did not want to see him elected. “And I would also go after the top leadership of the FBI and DOJ at the time.”
Bartiromo noted that two of the people who were on the FBI’s sham investigation of team Trump are now on Mueller’s team.
“Ooooh, yes, Maria, very good point that the media continues to ignore!” Nunes exclaimed. He pointed out that it was actually four people who were on the FBI investigation who were hired by Mueller to join the special counsel team, but two of them (Strzok and Page) were fired when their anti-Trump text messages were discovered. He said the fact that Andrew Weissmann, aka Mueller’s “pit bull,” is the lead investigator on the special counsel team after being part of the corrupt FBI investigation is a “joke.”
The California Republican pointed out that the FBI obtained a FISA warrant using the dubious Clinton-funded dirty dossier and then “spied on the Trump campaign using these very sophisticated tools that we have in our arsenal that are supposed to target terrorists and other bad guys, [and] they used to target a political campaign operative.”
He added: “These people were all in the chain of custody of this information. It’s absolutely ludicrous.”
Nunes also shared his suspicions about what is inside a secret Justice Department memo authored by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in August of 2017, that laid out the scope of the Mueller’s special counsel investigation and the potential crimes he’s authorized to pursue.
“I think it’s possible that the Steele dossier — the Clinton dirt — is what’s in that scope memo that they refuse to make public to the American people and even refuse to brief Congress on,” Nunes said.
Mueller provided a federal judge with an unredacted version of the memo last May, but it remains heavily redacted and hidden from the public.
Nunes told Bartiromo that Republicans on the Intelligence Committee continue to get new information and “the walls are closing in” closer to the people who need to be held responsible for abusing their power in 2016 to spy on the Trump campaign.
Unfortunately, since they are now in the minority, he noted, “all we can really do is refer people to the Department of Justice for prosecution and for this to be investigated.”
Nunes said that he was “hopeful” that that will happen.
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