House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said Sunday the “first thing” President Trump should do, given the reporting on Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein floating the idea of removing him from office, is to recommit to last week’s order to declassify Russia-related documents.
After making a declaration Monday to have these documents declassified and Russia-related texts from officials, including FBI Director James Comey, released, Trump reversed course by the end of the week. In a pair of tweets Friday he announced that after meeting with DOJ officials warning that the move could be perceived as tampering with the Russia investigation and hearing concerns from “key allies,” that he would leave it to the DOJ inspector general to review the documents.
In an interview with “Fox and Friends Weekend,” Nunes, R-Calif., was asked to respond to the New York Times report Friday that said Rosenstein talked about secretly recording Trump and invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to oust the president after Comey was fired in May 2017. Rosenstein has denied considering such actions, and follow-up reports said he was being sarcastic or joking about the wire.
“If they’re talking about wearing wires, 25th Amendment, but they have no evidence of Trump colluding with Russians from some of the top investigators — we now know that from text messages — this is really an investigation in search of a crime,” Nunes said, referring to testimony by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that investigators could not prove there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia when Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel last year.
Asked how Trump should react, Nunes said: “The first thing he should do is declassify all the documents that we have been asking for.”
Nunes is among a smattering of conservative lawmakers who have pushed for the release of these documents and more, claiming they will show bias against Trump at the highest levels of the DOJ and FBI. Some of the documents covered in Trump’s order relate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant process seeking the authority to spy on onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page, who had suspicious ties to Russia. Those warrant applications have already been made available to the public, but in redacted form. Nunes noted that Rosenstein signed off on it.
“Guess who signed? Rod Rosenstein. So the deputy attorney general and remember, it was Rod Rosenstein and DOJ who brought the president into a meeting with a lot of senior intelligence people and said ‘Mr. President, we have to do something else here. We really need to take care of our national security issues here. We don’t want to expose anybody,’ blah, blah blah,” Nunes, alluding to the meeting that Rosenstein attended in which officials sought to convince Trump to renege on his declassificaiton order.
Nunes stopped short of saying Rosenstein, with whom he has previously clashed over document requests, should be fired, at least for now.
“Well, I don’t think — look, the answer, I think, is no, for now, because, right now, before an election, without knowing all the facts, until you could actually bring in all of these people to know exactly what Rosenstein said … I’m not a guy who’s going to go on a witch hunt, right?” Nunes said. “So, Rod Rosenstein should have his fair day in court. However, if Rod Rosenstein really did talk about wearing a wire, then, for sure, he should be fired.”
Nunes didn’t explicitly say in what forum Rosenstein should answer for the report, but one key Trump ally, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., did say Saturday that Rosenstein should come before Congress.
At least one prominent GOP lawmaker has broken with Nunes’ urgent call for Trump to reconsider and quickly have the Russia-related documents declassified. “I think the president has taken a reasonable approach, which is giving [FBI Director] Chris Wray and [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats a chance to come in and advocate why it should not be released,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, a member of the intelligence panel and chairman of the Oversight Committee, said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
Gowdy, who has seen the documents, said last week that there are no game-changers in those documents, but did allude to one interesting document about former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, whose boast to an Australian diplomat that Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton triggered the federal Russia investigation, and said the records would be “embarrassing” to ex-CIA director and vocal Trump critic John Brennan.
Meanwhile, Democrats have said the push to declassify the documents would endanger national security by revealing sources and methods the intelligence community uses to attain information and accused Republicans of trying to taint the Mueller investigation.
