CONGRESSMAN: MORE CRIMINAL REFERRALS “HIGHLY LIKELY”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Apr. 14, 2019) — During the second half of today’s “Sunday Morning Futures, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC11) said he and House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan (R-OH4) recently met with the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, about issues stemming from the eight criminal referrals made by Rep. Devin Nunes last week amid the broader scope of the FBI probe into the Trump campaign, details of which were leaked to the media.
Meadows said Nunes’s referrals contain information which Meadows and others were able to confirm for themselves during interviews of FBI and DOJ officials as a number of congressional committees conducted probes independently of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia “collusion” investigation.
The Mueller investigation ended March 22 with no evidence found that anyone in the campaign “colluded” with the Russian government, Attorney General William Barr reported in a summary letter two days later.
Meadows praised Horowitz’s ongoing investigations and said his next report is expected “in the next 4-6 weeks.” He added that he expects it “highly likely” that the upcoming report will make criminal referrals mirroring those Nunes sent to Barr last week involving the “leaking of classified information and the role that the media played in all of that.”
Last June, Horowitz issued a 568-page report highly critical of former FBI Director James Comey and a number of former FBI officials for bias and poor judgment in 2016. Horowitz also referred former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for criminal investigation for allegedly lying to investigators about his contacts, or authorizations of others to have contact, with the media.
Meadows specifically mentioned information published by The New York Times and The Washington Post, some of which, he confirmed to Bartiromo, was used as “probable cause” for at least one FISA warrant application, that of 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Although alleged to have been suspected of working for the Russian government, Carter Page was never charged with a crime. Page has thus far unsuccessfully attempted to obtain legal remedy for the “defamation” he has claimed as a result of media reports based on information which came from the U.S. intelligence community.
Meadows told Bartiromo that of the “evidence” submitted to the FISA court for the Page warrant, “over 90-95% of this was either the dossier or open-source intel which came from media reports, so there’s not any ‘there’ there,” referring to a statement made by former counterintelligence official Peter Strzok in a text message to then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Both individuals worked on the Hillary Clinton private-server investigation and the Trump-Russia “collusion” probe, although once Horowitz located thousands of text messages exchanged between the two exhibiting political bias against Trump, Strzok was relegated to the FBI’s Human Resources department, only to be fired last August.
The “dossier” is the 35-page document compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who later said in sworn testimony in his home country of Great Britain that he had not verified the information it contained.
Lisa Page resigned from the Bureau in May. Both she and Strzok, who were having an extramarital affair in 2016, testified to members of Congress that they worked without political bias.
In one text message, Strzok had told Page that as he saw claims of Trump-Russia “collusion,” he was unsure that there was any “‘there’ there.”
Meadows characterized the “predication” for the Trump investigation as “a large fabrication.”
In response to Bartiromo’s suggestion that government departments other than the FBI and DOJ were coordinating an effort to paint the Trump campaign as coordinating with Russians, Meadows said, “I can tell you that Attorney General Barr is spot-on to expand the scope of his investigation…to really look at the State Department, the CIA, and the Intel community that were involved in this. That’s going largely unreported, but I can tell you, based on unclassified documents we’ve reviewed, we saw that Bill Brennan’s [sic] name with the CIA; we’ve seen others within the State Department mentioned very early on, and they were actually coordinating back and forth with the FBI in the early stages of the investigation…It was a coordinated effort with the Intelligence communities outside the FBI and to the extent of that, I think AG Barr is going to look at that.”
Meadows later corrected “Bill Brennan” to “John Brennan” and stressed that he has not seen Horowitz’s expected report in advance.