House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has to deal with ranking minority member Adam Schiff. It’s part of his job, but it can’t be pleasant. Schiff is of course an artist of the calculated lie and the straight face. Somewhere along the line, however, Nunes touched a nerve. The Democrats lodged a bogus ethics charge against him (now dismissed) and the Democrats’ media adjunct treats him like a leper.
Yesterday Maria Bartiromo interviewed Nunes on her FOX Business Network Sunday Morning Futures show. The first segment is below. It is interesting throughout. He notes the Democrats’ theatrical tears on the temporary withholding of their memo for redaction. He also expresses guarded condemnation of the possible wrongs committed against Carter Page: “Carter Page is an interesting individual. OK? But he also was a guy who — who cooperated with the FBI back in 2013, they used him in a court case to say the Russians actually didn’t even want to recruit Carter Page. But look, I don’t agree with Carter Page on very much, but the guy shouldn’t have his e-mails or phone calls listened to and eavesdropped in to.”
Toward the end of this segment he makes a point I had lost sight of: “[T]he big felony in all of this that nobody talks about from the very beginning was the leak of highly classified information when they leaked the phone call of the Russian ambassador talking to General Mike Flynn right before the inauguration. That was a felony. Nothing’s ever been done about it and — and people are sitting — like myself are sitting there, hey, you want to go after people who were colluding with — with the Russians? Great. But let’s first start with the felonies that we actually know that took place.”
The second segment is below.
In this segment Nunes notes a hazy shade of Winer:
[W]hat we originally said is that we had an investigation into the State Department and how information was coming into the State Department and then getting to other agencies. Since we announced that, just a little over a week ago, we’ve had numerous people that were at the State Department at the time who have now come out and are spilling their guts.
In fact, so much so, one of them actually wrote an op-ed as to why I was investigating him. It was published in the Washington Post. Which I thought was a little bizarre, because we hadn’t even reached out to him yet. The only people that I know had reached out to him or named that individual was Chuck Grassley, Senator Grassley, who was also conducting an investigation. So names are beginning to spill out, names that I think would ring a bell, like Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal, who are known long-time Hillary Clinton advocates….
Somehow, what it appears like, if you believe the Washington Post editorial or op-ed, is that these cast of characters were putting information similar to the — the original Steele dossier, what appears to be in a — a different Steele dossier, if you believe them, which was attacking Trump and feeding that into the FBI.
I have lifted the quotes above from the transcript by Tim Haims/RealClearPolitics.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.