Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson challenged House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., on Wednesday to give him the unredacted version of the application used by the Justice Department and FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant so they could spy on a Trump campaign associate.
“You are the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, you’re elected by voters to make these judgments,” Carlson told the California Republican. “Bureaucrats elected by nobody are telling us, threatening us basically, that it hurts national security. You’re the one with the power. Why don’t you send it to me? We will put it on the air and let the public decide.”
But Nunes equivocated, saying he wasn’t “the one with the power.”
“Can you imagine the field day they would have against me or if any other Republicans talked about what is now classified information?” Nunes replied before he was cut off by Carlson.
“But who cares!” Carlson shot back. “So you have journalists arguing on behalf of holding information back. That’s insane.”
“If you live in a world where journalists are saying the public should know less, they have been discredited by definition,” he continued. “We don’t have to listen to them. They’re not journalists, they are something less, they are flacks.”
Nunes has been calling on President Trump for months to declassify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court application submitted by the Justice Department and the FBI seeking permission to wiretap former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page as part of its investigation into possible ties between the campaign and Russia. In July, DOJ released a heavily redacted version of the document.
The FISA warrant application has been a lighting rod for Republicans given it was based, in part, on a salacious, mostly unverified dossier compiled by ex-British foreign intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
[Byron York: Why didn’t FBI tell court about Christopher Steele bias?]
Congressional GOP members have repeatedly clashed with DOJ and the FBI over documents regarding the Russia and Hillary Clinton email probes, going as far as to pass a resolution in June demanding that the materials be released. Some lawmakers, including Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., warned that failure to comply with their requests could result in officials being held in contempt or even the start of impeachment proceedings.
The House Intelligence Committee in January opened an investigation into DOJ and the FBI regarding the probes.
