Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said that he was suspicious beginning in the late summer of 2016, almost from the moment President Barack Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, briefed him on Russian interference in the hotly contested presidential campaign between now-President Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The California Republican, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, had begged the Obama administration for years, he said, to address Russia’s illicit activities around the globe, but was instead stiff-armed. So when Brennan started making the rounds on Capitol Hill with warnings of Moscow’s interference in the heat of the political season, alarm bells starting ringing — not because he doubted Russian President Vladimir Putin was meddling, but because he wondered why now.
“It wasn’t believable then, their sudden interest in this issue that they had ignored for so many years,” Nunes said in an expansive conversation with “Behind Closed Doors,” a Washington Examiner podcast. “When Brennan first came to brief me … there was really nothing new in that briefing and, in fact, it was really light on details.”
The full podcast airs on Thursday.
Nunes declined to reveal specifics of Brennan’s briefing, saying the information was probably still classified. Brennan, after Obama left office and he retired from the CIA, became a sharp critic of Trump and his attacks on the U.S. intelligence community, on Robert Mueller’s federal probe into Russian interference, and on possible collusion with Moscow by the president and his associates.
[John Brennan: Trump’s press conference performance ‘was nothing short of treasonous’]
It’s the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia interfered in the 2016 campaign to boost Trump’s chances in the race against Clinton. That determination, made in December of 2016, some weeks after the election, hardened Nunes’ suspicions that the intelligence community was “cooking” up a narrative to cast doubt on Trump’s legitimacy.
The congressman, a staunch Trump defender and chief antagonist of the Mueller probe, said he agreed with the intelligence agencies’ original conclusion — that Putin interfered in the campaign “to sow discord.”
But Nunes, a Russia hawk who is occasionally critical of Trump’s attempts to cozy up to Moscow, said that he has never found credible the explanation that Putin interfered to help this president win, despite Russian strongman’s preference for nationalist leaders and his comments in a joint press conference with the president in Helsinki that he was rooting for the Republican.
“I don’t need to read one piece of intelligence to understand what Putin believed. Because Putin believed like the other 200 countries in this globe, and that was that Donald Trump had zero chance of winning. Putin didn’t have any extra information,” Nunes said. “What does an adversary do at that point? If Hillary Clinton’s going to be the next president, you put out whatever you can to sow discord in our electoral process.”
Nunes discussed at length his problems with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counter-intelligence investigation turned special counsel investigation run by Mueller, a former FBI director.
Conceptually, the House Intelligence Committee chairman appears most bothered by suggestions that Trump might have colluded with the Russians, a storyline he blames on opponents of the president inside the intelligence community and a compliant media that is bent on delegitimizing Trump.
On the issue of interference alone, Nunes is slightly less critical. And yet the congressman was dismissive of the special counsel investigation’s most consequential results to date: indictments of a dozen Russian intelligence operatives for interfering in the 2016 elections and, specifically, for hacking the computer servers of the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic Party entities.
Nunes said the House Intelligence Committee was aware of the facts in the indictment for more than a year, saying that the panel’s final report on its probe of 2016 includes more relevant information than the indictment included.
“Why did it take a year and a half to get to?” Nunes said. “So, I only question the timing and the politics of it. It looks to me to be very political on the face of it because you have, for one thing — we knew about all of this for at least a year.”
“Secondly, why did they not talk about the RNC being hacked? It just reads like a political document,” Nunes continued. “I don’t mind going after Russians — I’m all for going after Russians and bringing attention to the issue. But the timing of the indictment and the way the indictment’s written — like I said, I’m not against indicting Russians, but it just leads to more suspicion for half of America.”
The Republican National Committee has always denied that its servers were hacked. Asked about this, Nunes said: “Well, you never know when you’re being hacked. I can just tell you that everybody’s vulnerable. And we know that they attempted to — the Republican National Committee, I think, stands by that they don’t believe that they were hacked.”
