After Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, mentioned wanting additional classified documents during a Sunday morning interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, President Donald Trump sprung into action.
Even though the president was, at the time, recovering from the coronavirus at Walter Reed medical hospital, he made clear that he was still plugged into the conservative-leaning Fox network’s Sunday Morning Futures.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows revealed that Trump had directed him to begin the process of getting Nunes what he needed, according to the Epoch Times.
“He’s already tasked me with getting some declassification rolling, in a follow up to some of the requests that Devin Nunes and others have made,” Meadows said Monday on Fox and Friends.
Specifically, Nunes sought additional information on the FBI’s interviews with Igor Danchenko, the primary sub-source of the Steele dossier.
Recent revelations from declassified documents suggested that Danchenko was a Russian agent, whose intention likely was to feed disinformation that would be harmful to the Trump campaign and presidency.
Moreover, Danchenko—a legal scholar and longtime analyst for the far-left Brookings Institution, specializing in Iran–Russia relations—had himself been under investigation by the FBI.
Although the FBI was —or should have been—aware that his reliability was an issue, they proceeded to use the dossier as justification for spying on Trump campaign advisers including Carter Page.
FBI Director James Comey last week feigned ignorance when grilled in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee as to why the reliability issues surrounding Danchenko did not raise any red flags in the bureau’s pursuit and renewal of surveillance warrants with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“The American public needs to see the three reports that we know about at least from the Democrats’ Russian spy that they hired,” Nunes said.
Nunes also referenced an explosive revelation last week that Comey and his top counterespionage agent Peter Strzok had ignored a referral from the CIA in September 2016 that Clinton had approved the Russia smear-job against Trump.
According to a letter that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe sent to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, the Senate Judiciary chair, Clinton’s purpose in doing so was to distract from the scandal and subsequent FBI investigation of her private email server.
On Tuesday, Ratcliffe reportedly declassified the handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan confirming that he had briefed then-President Barack Obama about the Clinton campaign’s scheme, Zero Hedge reported.
Comey acknowledged reading Ratcliffe’s letter during his testimony last week but said he could not recall the investigative referral (which the FBI apparently declined to follow up on) and insisted he could not understand the letter.
But Nunes helped to simplify it for Comey and at-home viewers in his Sunday morning interview:
“The Clinton campaign created this sick fantasy,” he said. “Then, they went out and hired avatars to do it,” Nunes said.
Some in the intelligence community—including current CIA Director Gina Haspel, who may have been involved in the conspiracy—have resisted the declassification effort.
But Nunes said he was confident that the material would prove incontrovertibly that the Obama FBI colluded with the Kremlin and with the Clinton campaign.
“The documents that are underlying that we now have seen—I’ve only seen a few of those—they’re definitely smoking guns,” he said.
“That information definitely needs to be made available to the American public,” he added. A”nd from what I understand there is even more underlying evidence that backs up what Director Ratcliffe put out.”
