Nunes: FBI Probe into Trump Campaign Started with State Department

“THAT WOULD BE TOTALLY IRREGULAR”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jun. 25, 2018) — During the 8:30 a.m. segment on Monday’s “Fox & Friends,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told the three co-hosts that he is not confident the FBI will comply with a 5:00 p.m. deadline to provide more information about the number of “informants” deployed to the Trump campaign in 2016.

Nunes and other House committee chairmen have been seeking a vast array of documents connected to their ongoing investigations into the Clinton private email server; reports that at least one “informant” was dispatched by the FBI to gather information from Trump campaign aides; and the reasoning for the opening of the “counterintelligence” operation, now the basis of the Special Counsel’s probe into Russian “meddling” in the election which has cost taxpayers close to $20 million.

On Sunday Fox News reported Nunes’s declared 5:00 p.m. Monday deadline for the FBI to expound on a “classified” letter it reportedly provided to him in response to his question about the interactions of an informant or informants with members of the Trump campaign, who paid them, and when they were hired.

Questions have also arisen over exactly when the FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.  While the FBI and The New York Times state that the official date was July 31, 2016, five former associates of the campaign have said they were contacted by what now appear to have been FBI “informants” in May of that year or possibly earlier.

Nunes and two other committee chairmen have sought hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation from the Justice Department and its subsidiary, the FBI, to shed light on why the agencies made certain decisions leading up to the presidential election and whether or not they were politically-motivated.  In an interview with Maria Bartiromo last Sunday, Nunes set a deadline for document production of Wednesday, June 20, which came and went.

Late Friday night, the DOJ released some of the subpoenaed documents, which did not satisfy Nunes.  When co-host Steve Doocy asked Nunes Monday morning if he believes the FBI will be responsive to the 5:00 p.m. deadline, Nunes responded, “Knowing the past, they’re probably not going to meet the deadline.  However, I think the American people are beginning to see what it is that we’ve been after for a very long time, and that is:  ‘Is it common, or does it ever happen, that the counterintelligence agencies or capabilities of this country — are they used to target political campaigns?’  We need to know that answer.”

Nunes said that his question is “very simple” which “deserves a very simple answer.”

One of the maneuvers the DOJ has invoked is its provision of documents only to the “Gang of Eight,” which consists of the chairman and ranking member of four congressional committees authorized to review classified information.

He said that the FBI letter he received late Friday night was a “textbook swampy example of what they do here in Washington” wherein federal agencies “tell you they’re going to get it by the end of the week and wait ’til nearly the stroke of midnight.”

However, Nunes told Doocy that “most of” the outstanding document requests were “cleaned up” last week “except for the most important piece, which is — there’s two pieces, really — but one is, you can’t use ‘Gang of Eight’  — you can’t take information that our investigators and our committee members found and then retroactively say, ‘No, no, no; sorry, Congress, we’re going to move that so only the leaders in Congress can see this information.'”

Nunes said that members of his committee will be meeting later on Monday with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to obtain documents but that the remaining question is, “Did you or did you not run informants into the Trump campaign, especially before the investigation even began?”

Nunes previously disclosed that after he was permitted to view the “EC,” or electronic communication, held by the DOJ which allegedly gave rise to the opening of the probe, he found no “underlying intelligence” from any of the “Five Eyes” nations — the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK — which would have warranted it.

Several minutes into the interview, Nunes asked rhetorically how the probe was launched followed by, “There was no Five Eyes intelligence product that was used; it was ran [sic] through the State Department; we now know that from State Department people who still need to be interviewed, who are now out there talking to their friends in the mainstream media; they say they’re the ones that got that information to the FBI.  That would be totally irregular how you opened that investigation in the first place.”

Nunes then opined that only “parts” of that narrative are accurate but repeated his question:  “Did you use the counterintelligence capabilities of this country to run informants or spies, or whatever you want to call them, into the Trump campaign before that date?”