Posted on 02/05/2018 5:59:40 PM PST by Kaslin
RUSH: Its a great honor and a thrill to introduce to you the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Devin Nunes of California. I know youve been making the rounds, and youre under assault. I appreciate you making time here, Congressman, to appear on the program today.
NUNES: Well, Rush, its an honor to be asked to be on your show, and Im just glad that we still got conservatives out there who want to get to the truth, and so anywhere that I can go to get the message out, Im more than glad to do it.
RUSH: Well, there are a lot of people that dont want the truth, a lot of people trying to not stymie the truth; they are trying to trash the truthers and people are coming after you almost as viciously as theyre going after President Trump. Now, Ive spent the last couple of hours detailing your memo and what I think some of the highlights are. But I want to ask you, what do you think is the most significant revelation in this memo?
NUNES: Well, I think the bottom line is is how they used the political intelligence, political dirt paid for by Clinton campaign, and it was funneled straight into the FBI and then used to spy on an American citizen, which was really designed to go after the Trump campaign. I mean, that is significant.
RUSH: Okay, explain how spying on Carter Page, because thats who you mean, I presume, how is that going after Trump? Tell people how that works.
NUNES: So, by getting the warrant on Carter Page, I believe what they thought would happen is that they would have a whole trail of emails so they could go in, and with the warrant, they can go back and grab all of Mr. Pages communications. And Im assuming what they believed was there was gonna be a treasure trove of, you know, emails of Carter Page, you know, colluding with Russians and the Trump campaign, which of course was a big goose egg; there was nothing there. We know that because Carter Page hasnt been charged with anything and the FISA warrants no longer on him.
So it was and, look, this is scary stuff, right? I mean, these are secret courts. And I have long supported these because its mainly to go after terrorists and people abroad who are looking to do bad things. Never did I think that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would be used to go after a political campaign. And, you know, theres gonna have to be some major reforms done to these programs. And what shocks me is that the people at these institutions arent worried about this.
I mean, you know, we have a hard enough time, Rush, trying to track down terrorists and bad guys around the world. And just the fact that they would have wasted our intelligence agencies time to go after somebody like Carter Page to try to get into the Trump campaign is really scary stuff and really a waste of taxpayer money, and I think every American should be concerned about this no matter if youre a Republican or Democrat or dont even pay attention to politics, you ought to care about this.
RUSH: Congressman Nunes, I mean, were all laymen here compared to you, but it appears that Donald Trump does represent a greater threat to some of these people than some of the terrorists that you are referring to here. I mean, youre absolutely right. I sometimes doubt the real impact of this has hit even people who were supportive.
Stop and think what really happened here. We have a political candidate who lost the election, commissions an opposition research document, the Steele dossier, which is then packaged and presented as legitimate intelligence gathered by respected intelligence agents the world over, and it features such shocking details as the golden showers story. We find out that Hillary Clintons campaign, the DNC paid for this, $10 million. We find out that Steele did not even talk to these people in Russia in person on the phone.
We then find out that the FBI uses this to get a warrant, as you say, to spy on Carter Page. They did not tell the court that this was a political document. This is the kind of thing that movie scripts contain and are made of. Its hard to get my arms around comprehending the number of people that had to be in on this and their motivation. Now, you may be nervous about going into motivation. To me, that is everything. Why? Whats the purpose here?
NUNES: Well, this gets to the bottom of what were looking at when you look at Peter Strzok and some of his text messages. You know, we still need to get to the bottom of what did the insurance policy mean? A lot of people, Look, its just pure speculation at this point, but it is very possible that the insurance policy was this counterintelligence investigation, and that would be really scary.
RUSH: But it isnt just counterintelligence, its actually theyre going after Trump criminally, are they not?
NUNES: Well, thats not what theyre supposed to do, right? I mean, thats not what a counterintelligence investigation, if youve talked to, you know, Andy McCarthy who writes for National Review, he said this numerous times, that a counterintelligence investigation is not criminal.
RUSH: Right. But this is. I mean, theyre trying to get President Trump paralyzed, impeached, convicted, thrown out. Everybody knows, Congressman, there would be no investigation of Russian interference if Hillary had won the election. Nobody would even be talking about it. Nobody would be worried about it. It would not even be a thing.
NUNES: Well, I think thats true, but, you know, we were asked to look into Russian interference and to try to determine if there was any collusion between the Trump campaign. And, you know, the attacks on me started a year ago. So I would you know, I said, Well, look. Ive seen all of this intelligence. Yeah, we know the Russians are bad, and we know the Russians are up to no good. But I never saw any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. And so I would say things like that, and I would just get attacked viciously by the left.
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: And then, you know, youre well aware of how they planted crap on me and basically accused me of leaking information, which was totally false. They had no evidence. And what was supposed to just take a few days to clarify, they stretched it to nine months to try to keep me from running the Russia investigation. So I was well aware of what they were willing to do to take someone out, which makes it obvious that youre over the target, right?
So once I knew that they were going after me when all I was doing was speaking the truth, I knew these characters were up to no good. So here we are in, you know, February of 2018 with absolutely no evidence of Trump colluding with Russians, but we have lots of evidence that everybody continues to ignore that the Hillary campaign was colluding with Russians. Because if you believe that Christopher Steele, who was paid by Hillary campaign, got his information from Russians and we do believe that he did get some information from the Russians I mean, theres your collusion. And it just so happens that the stuff that came in, its salacious and unverified, as said by Director Comey, and we have not verified any of the crazy accusations, like the golden shower issue.
So thats where we are right now. We continue to investigate. We continue to do interviews. But, Ill tell you what, you know, every time we get in these interviews, the Democrats read every name in the Russian phone numbers to the witnesses, and of course they keep running dry drilling dry holes.
RUSH: Well, since theres nothing to be found, I mean, I dont want to lead you in any direction or put words in your mouth, but Ive been trying to understand, okay, Russians interfered in the election. What did they do? What is the allegation? Whatever, whoever wanted you to investigate this, what was the suspicion? What did they do that they would not have done if Hillary had won the election?
NUNES: Yeah. I mean, look, the Russians are notorious. Theres no question that they always try to play games in elections. Okay? But
RUSH: Well, thats always true. This is not the first year.
NUNES: Yeah. Theres nothing new about that. But, you know, one of the things that were looking at in the Russia investigation in the House of Representatives, and this never gets covered by the mainstream media, but we are actually looking into did they collude with not just Trump, but did they collude with any other campaign. So, you know, and thats what weve uncovered. The only thing weve uncovered so far in our investigation is the fact that Christopher Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton, who got information from Russians and funneled it to the FBI. So our investigation is uncovering things, and we are finding collusion. Its just the mainstream media continues to ignore it
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: and they continue to attack me, the messenger, whos just trying to get to the bottom of what happened.
RUSH: People ask me if I think the FISA court was misled during the application for the warrant, because we know that the FBI did not tell the FISA court your memo clarifies, they didnt tell the FISA court that this was a political document, that it was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton. They presented it as legitimate intelligence. So what is the courts involvement here, if thats in fact what did happen, if the FBI misrepresented their primary evidence in the warrant application and the court was essentially tricked or fooled, what is the remedy for that?
NUNES: So the easiest thing would be the court could hold them in contempt. Now, typically a court never holds somebody in contempt, especially not DOJ and FBI, and this is part of the problem. You could lose your law license, you know, its a major problem if you lie to the court. You know, another option that some of my colleagues have called on, would be a special counsel to look into just what DOJ and FBI did, and then they could bring charges against some of these folks. You know, and we need to know, you know, where did the order come down from? Was this just a couple people, or did this come from above?
We just dont know who made the decision, you know, not to present all the facts to the court. And the irony of the attacks, the relentless attacks on us are outstanding, right? So we were accused that we were gonna destroy our nations secrets and if we let the public know what really happened before the court that this was gonna do harm that would harm our national security. So we went to great lengths to reduce this down to just what the people needed to know, just the facts, heres the facts, heres the real abuse at the highest level that we see.
Well, now, were being criticized for not giving all the information. Well, we did that on purpose to try to just give the pertinent information. But I think, as you begin to peel this onion back, theres more and more information out there, and youre starting to see some of this is starting to explode as it deals with the State Department and the shenanigans that they were up to in 2016 also.
RUSH: Yeah, the unmasking; you had Samantha Power; you have Susan Rice, the record number of Americans unmasked toward the trail end of the Obama administration. I have to take a brief break here. Well come back and continue. Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee with us. Stay right where you are.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Welcome back with Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman, is there more to come? Ive seen allusions to potentially four or five more memos that you might write, and then of course theres the Democrat memo that Adam Schiff is talking about. So whats yet to come here?
NUNES: Okay. So, first of all, you always have to love the narratives that the mainstream media creates. So they want to make this look like, Oh, theyre just putting out a lot of these politically driven memos. All right. So as I was saying in the last segment, we had to follow this process in the House because it was DOJ and FBI, and they cant investigate themselves, right? So theres no way that we can get this information. So you think if I sent this information to the DOJ and FBI, they were not gonna let it out, right? I mean, thats why they you know, they were doing anything and everything to keep the public from getting to know what actually happened
RUSH: Yeah, but theyve said since its nothing but a nothing burger. I mean, if its a nothing burger, why were they working so hard to prevent it coming out?
NUNES: Right. Right. So thats exactly what happened. So now theyre trying to mock us, Oh, theyve got all these new memos. So heres the truth. So we had to use this process in order to let the American people know what happened in the 2016 election in terms of FISA abuse. So phase 1 of our investigation was just on the origins of the investigation and how we believe they abused the FISA. Phase 2 that were moving to now, I mean, weve been investigating for a very long time, but some of its starting to break out in the open because of a lot of work that Senator Grassley of Iowa is doing. And we are looking at the State Department and their involvement in some of the shenanigans in the 2016 election.
RUSH: This is the Obama State Department?
NUNES: The Obama State Department, yeah, back in 2016. So that is an ongoing investigation. There will be more to come on that. But I laugh that, you know, the mainstream media wants to turn this into a memo war, you know, and theyre promoting the Democrats memo and the headlines are always the mean Republicans are not letting the Democrats release their memo. Which, you know, the irony is the Democrats and everybody opposed us, you know, including DOJ and all the mainstream media, said were gonna destroy our nations secrets.
But now its okay to have the Democrats and Adam Schiffs memo out. I mean, democracy does die in darkness. The problem is the darkness is emanating from the mainstream media themselves. I mean, they refuse, they absolutely refuse to cover the truth. They dont want to cover it.
RUSH: Well, theyre not the media anymore, Congressman. This is really what youre alluding to. The same bunch here that risked going to jail to publish the Pentagon papers, government secrets, is now doing everything it can to suppress the work done by the chairman of a committee of duly elected representatives of the people. I mean, the medias clearly chosen sides. And their objective here is to stymie anybody who would promote the Trump agenda or damage the Obama agenda. And thats just the reality of the world that you and everybody else has to deal with here.
NUNES: Yeah.
RUSH: Its all part of the corruption of our great system.
NUNES: And, Rush, I think thats exactly right. Ive never seen anything like this before. You know, and Ill even try to talk to some of these reporters. I try to deal with them, and you cannot get through to them. I mean, theyve always been partisan, almost all of them are left wing, but, I mean, they go crazy. Almost every story is fake news. Almost every story that runs about me is fake. I mean, its unbelievable the stuff that is out there, and, you know, you try to go correct the record. Like Ill tell some of them, theyll, You dont talk to me anymore.
Im like, Well, you havent corrected the 10 stories you wrote that are totally fake. And, you know, I dont know how you fix that. So pretty much all I can do is not talk to them because all theyll do is take whatever I say and take it out of context. I mean, like the greatest one was from this morning, so I was on Fox & Friends, and of course I misspoke a little bit, right, where I said that Papadopoulos, you know, didnt know Trump, right? So then the left immediately and all the media they put out, oh, no, theres a picture of Donald Trump and Papadopoulos.
Okay. So sorry, mainstream media, there was a photo-op that everybody thats there admits that it was a photo-op. Donald Trump and Papadopoulos did not have any, you know, other than just saying hello there. You know, itd be like if I went to a U2 concert and Im at the concert hall there, and I say that, you know, Ive met all the members of U2. I mean, it doesnt work that way.
RUSH: Well, Papadopoulos is just a stand-in for Carter Page and Manafort. When those things blew up, then they stumbled into this picture of Papadopoulos, he gets drunk and starts bragging to some ambassador about dirt on Hillary, and so since theyve got nothing, they glom onto that. But, remember, people that watch ABC, CBS, and CNN and all that, read the New York Times, they dont know who Fusion GPS is.
NUNES: Right. Theyve never been covered.
RUSH: They dont know the basics of your memo. All they know that your memo is a nothing burger and that you are a partisan trying to prop up a perverted, boorish president and trying to unwind the great Barack Obama agenda. And thats all they know about you.
NUNES: And you know, heres an interesting these are facts. So our memo, the Republican memo, when we made it available for all House members to read, nearly all the Republicans came down and read the memo. Only a handful of Democrats, like less than 10, read our memo.
RUSH: Of course.
NUNES: Okay? Of course the media never writes about that, never talks about that. Now the Democrats have their memo, okay, that they have, and we made it available for all members of the House to read. So do you realize that more Republicans have actually come down to read the Democratic memo than Democrats themselves have read their own memo.
RUSH: Thats because they know this memos a joke. Its nothing more than an attempt to dilute and water down yours. Schiff doesnt have anything. Look, I have to take a break here coming up. Hang on if you can for just a few more minutes. I know youre busy, but we need to wrap it up in a professional manner, not like this, so dont go away.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And welcome back. We wrap up here with Congressman Nunes. I thought of one more thing I wanted to run by you during the break. And it was I played the audio sound bite of this earlier. Its a former CIA counterintelligence muckety-muck guy named Phillip Mudd, and there have been two other people like him over the weekend saying to President Trump, You know what? If youre gonna pick a fight with the FBI, you dont want to make those guys mad.
They can really come after you. And Ive heard that before. The same thing has been said by Chuck Schumer to President Trump about the CIA, the intelligence community. Im sure youre getting the same kind of insults. Now, with people saying, You better not make the FBI mad! They could really come out and do you damage or come after you, doesnt that kind of validate whats already going on, if we have people advocating that the FBI be used as a weapon against political opponents?
NUNES: Yeah. So those days are over, Rush. That is what they did in the Obama administration. These institutions became corrupt at the top, and its not just the FBI. Its all of the departments who became just out of control. I mean, do we have to go back to Lois Lerner and the IRS and all of those games that were played?
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: And whats happening here is that the first time in a long time Congress which is a separate branch of government. We created the FBI.
RUSH: Right!
NUNES: We created the Department of Justice.
RUSH: You could abolish them if you want to!
NUNES: We could abolish them. We could cut their money off. But the bottom line is this. I said, Were done. You cross the rubicon. You abused the FISA court. And, you know, I had to fight for these documents for months and months and months. We issued the original subpoenas back in August of last year, and it took until just a few weeks ago for us to finally put all the pieces together. So, you know, Im not gonna take their crap. Im not gonna be threatened. They tried to do an end run around me, and Speaker Paul Ryan said, No. The Congress is gonna exert our authority.
And so, look, I believe between the Congress conducting proper oversight and with President Trump trying to drain the swamp, I believe we will get this corrected. But the longer it takes for them to admit they have a problem, the harder its gonna be to fix this. I think the right thing to do would be for DOJ the Department of Justice to come out and say, Okay. Look, Congress. We got it.
We made some mistakes. We clearly You know, we may agree to disagree, but we understand that you dont want us using political dirt paid for by one campaign to be used against another and open investigations on that campaign based on that dirt. We understand you dont want that. If they would just admit that, wed probably be getting to the solution phase of our investigation.
RUSH: Congressman, look, you wont find anybody more optimistic than I am, but theyre not gonna do anything like that through the rest of this year. Everybody that were talking about here has dreams of the Democrats winning the House back in 2018 and bringing to life all of these dreams they have about impeaching Trump and stringing you up and so forth. This is gonna get Its gonna stay vicious all the way through this year. And youve referenced the media. The media, they dont do news anymore.
NUNES: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: And Im not telling you anything.
NUNES: Yeah.
RUSH: Theyre part of the opposition now. And I think, you know, your appearance here today is an indication to me of your fortitude and how great you are. The more the public can hear from you, the better. Unedited.
NUNES: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: You know, its just because you are genuine and youre real and you care about this. And I know youre busy, but the more time you can spend talking to people other than media outlets, the better our side is gonna be, because you are the guy with the knowledge. You know more than you can tell us even right now, and you know whats coming, and I think everybody who knows you knows without a doubt that you wouldnt put in that memo or anything else youre gonna say about this anything that is not true that you cant back up. Theres nothing in it for you to do that.
NUNES: Thats right, and not only that, I laugh about this when they say how short it is and how little we put in there. And I alluded to this a little bit earlier. You know, we actually We would have liked to have put a lot more in there because theres a lot more really bad stuff. And I guess thats the thing, Rush, I would say is that I do have some level of optimism that ultimately DOJ will begin to do the right thing, right? I do think there are some ways out of this mess. The media? I agree. They are
I mean, theyre wholly bought and paid for by the left. Its embarrassing, actually, how bad theyve become. But I do believe that some of these institutions You know, look, the FBI? Everybody wants the FBI to be successful and do things right. So I think those problems could be fixed. I agree with you, though, that for half of America, a little less than half of America, they are gonna believe had to Trump colluded with Russia because hes already been tried and convicted by the mainstream media. And its hard to get Americans turned around the other way.
RUSH: Yeah, but you still cant define what Trump did. You cant even explain it. Nobody can explain what the corruption, collusion conspiracy was. Did they mess with ballot boxes? They mess with voting machines? Did somebody get involved in the count? What do they do?
NUNES: Well, I can tell you what they do. (chuckling) They infiltrated the Hillary campaign and gave her a bunch of phony dirt on Trump and they were able to get it few the FBI and open a counterintelligence investigation.
RUSH: Exactly right. Thats where the collusion is. Exact. Well, look, Congressman, I really appreciate it again, and God bless you.
NUNES: Hey, thanks a lot, Rush, and Id love be to be on again.
RUSH: Any time you want, you now have the number.
NUNES: Okay. (chuckling) I wont give it to anybody.
RUSH: Youre one of five people who have the number.
NUNES: Well, thank you.
RUSH: So if a sixth person calls, were gonna know who gave it out.
NUNES: I appreciate that. (chuckling)
RUSH: All right. (chuckling) Congressman Devin Nunes of the House Judiciary Committee. Hes the chairman and the primary author of the memo.
Btt
Getting ready to listen right now..
BFL
It was very good. Thank you, Rush.
Bump to the top.
I think Obama is helping the swamp...we need to know what he knows about the election...I think he helped the Russians, since the Russians want Hillary to win. We need to pass a Voter ID laws...and no early election days...if you are to busy to vote election day, than you shouldn’t vote...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.