On this weekend’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, offered an explanation as to why the Trump administration was not allowing the release of a memo authored by committee ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
Nunes told host Maria Bartiromo that the Democrat memo contained sensitive information, and it was done so intentionally.
Partial transcript as follows:
BARTIROMO: So let me — let me kick it off with that and the fact that the White House has denied the request to release Adam Schiff’s memo. What can you tell us about that memo? You’ve seen it. What do we need to understand about this?
NUNES: Well first off, this was not a surprise. So this was after they had accused the Republicans of putting sources and methods into our memo, we actually did not, we just put in what the thought the American people needed to know. It was clear from the development of the Democratic memo from the very beginning that they packed it full of sources and methods.
Now, for the viewers out there, what are sources and methods? We don’t want to give up the way that our intelligence committee recruits sources, the methods that they may use to recruit (ph) sources. So these are things that don’t need to be made public. However, the Democrats knew this, they — they packed their memo full of sources and methods. Now, on Friday night, we received a letter back from the White House.
The White House did not deny the — the release of the Democrat memo — the Democrats’ memo. What they did is they said look, you need to make some redactions and some technical corrections here and we will get it out right away. Now, from that point, we’ve heard nothing but crickets. The Democrats have been on TV all weekend long. Their memo is sitting at the House Intelligence Committee down at the bottom of the capital waiting to be redacted.
If they really wanted to get it out, they’d be down there all day yesterday redacting it, getting it back over to the White House so that the public can know what’s in it
BARTIROMO: So —
NUNES: So this is — this is nothing but politics.
BARTIROMO: And within the Democratic memo, there was no rejection of the point of your memo, which was, bottom line, the FBI used government resources to spy on a political enemy.
NUNES: Well, right. We actually want the Democratic memo out. We think it’s ridiculous on the face of it. We think it’s very political how about they attack myself, they attack Chairman Gowdy, they turn Carter Page into some super-secret Russian spy, they talk about how Christopher Steele is a really, really good source when we know that he lied to the FBI. So we want this out. We don’t know why they’re not in this weekend redacting it so that we can get it back to the White House so the president can declassify it.
BARTIROMO: Right. And but they did not deny the omission of information that has taken place here. Basically, the FBI goes to the FISA court and presents this so-called dossier of unverified information about Donald Trump during an election, and they do not tell the FISA court that the dossier was actually paid for by Hillary Clinton.
NUNES: Yes. And not only that — I mean that’s the — the — the crux of our argument, the (ph) why are we going through all this. Well, phase one of our investigation was to look at the FISA abuse. So we very simply said look, the — the court didn’t know that the Democrats paid for this. Now, remember, this is an — an investigation into the other campaign. I would think a judge would need to know that.
They also omitted the fact — after they discovered that Christopher Steele went and talked to multiple media outlets and that they had used some of those media outlets, some of the stories to corroborate the dossier, you would think somehow, someone somewhere would say hey, we better go tell the FISA court this. They — they didn’t do it the first time, they didn’t do it the second time, they didn’t do it the third time, in fact, they didn’t even do it the fourth time.
So a full year they were spying on an American citizen who was affiliated with the Trump campaign, and the court didn’t know any of that for four times in a row.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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