Rep. Devin Nunes vowed to expand his lawsuit against Fusion GPS on Saturday, a day after a federal court dismissed the California Republican’s racketeering conspiracy case against the opposition research firm.
The judge gave the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee 30 days to file another amended complaint.
“Congressman Nunes is pleased that the Court has granted him the opportunity to clarify and amplify the long history and pattern of obstruction by Fusion GPS,” Nunes’s lawyer Steven Biss told the Washington Examiner. “We have plenty of supplementary evidence to add to our filing, including ongoing examples of Fusion’s malfeasance.”
Last September, Nunes filed his lawsuit against Fusion GPS, its founder Glenn Simpson, and the left-leaning watchdog group Campaign for Accountability, seeking $9.9 million in damages.
Nunes told the court in an amended complaint in December that the “ongoing and continuous racketeering activities” by the defendants were “part of a joint and systematic effort” to “impede,” “undermine,” and “ultimately to derail” Nunes’s congressional investigation into Russian interference. Nunes claimed the groups “acted in concert” to file “fraudulent and retaliatory ‘ethics’ complaints” against him to “harass and intimidate” him and to “protect Simpson, Fusion GPS, and others from criminal referrals” made to the Justice Department.
Judge Liam O’Grady of the Eastern District of Virginia said on Friday the defendants “raise significant questions and make meritorious arguments as to both the sufficiency of the factual pleadings and the court’s jurisdiction over these defendants.”
The judge said Nunes’s amended complaint “includes many rote statements of law and conclusory allegations which fall short of satisfying the pleading standard” and said that the legal claims were “insufficient to support a substantive ruling on these issues.”
O’Grady ruled that Nunes’s lawsuit was “hereby dismissed without prejudice,” but said Nunes had a month to try again, in accordance with the federal rules prohibiting frivolous lawsuits.
Fusion GPS’s lawyer did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
Daniel Stevens, the executive director for the Campaign for Accountability, told the Washington Examiner that “we applaud the court’s decision to dismiss this frivolous lawsuit” and claimed “the allegations in the complaint were obviously absurd.”
“Attempts by Nunes to stifle critics through well-funded lawsuits is an affront to the First Amendment,” Stevens said, adding, “We are gratified that the court put an end to this nonsense.”
Nunes’s amended complaint was filed just after the November release of a book by Fusion GPS’s founders, titled Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump, and the December release of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses.
Horowitz identified at least 17 “significant errors or omissions” in the DOJ’s and the FBI’s use of British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier when pursuing FISA warrants to wiretap Trump campaign associate Carter Page in 2016 and 2017. Simpson refused to speak with Horowitz’s investigators.
Defenders of the controversial House Intelligence Committee memo on alleged FISA abuses from February 2018, which also shed light on Fusion GPS, argue Horowitz’s report shows the Republicans were almost entirely correct.
Nunes told the court that “this is a case about active, coordinated, and ongoing corruption, fraud, and obstruction of justice” which was “now admitted” in Fusion GPS’s book and “chronicled” in the Justice Department watchdog report.
“The outright fabrications in the Steele ‘dossier’ are the product of a joint collaborative effort between Steele and Fusion GPS. Steele and Fusion GPS, acting in concert, lied to the FBI and spread lurid and fake anecdotes in order to obstruct the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Nunes alleged. “The fabrication of raw intelligence and the misrepresentation and concealment of information provided by sources is an ordinary part of Fusion GPS’s criminal operations.”
Lawyers for the Campaign for Accountability countered the lawsuit.
“Plaintiff, a sitting congressman, has come before this Court to argue that the submission of ethic complaints against him to the Office of Congressional Ethics is illegal,” John McGavin, the lawyer for the Campaign for Accountability, told the court in a motion to dismiss in January. “Masquerading an untimely defamation claim as an infirm RICO case, Plaintiff has sought to criminalize lawful conduct.”
McGavin said Nunes “implausibly alleges that the submission of three ethics complaints about him to the U.S. House of Representatives Office of Congressional Ethics violated RICO.”
The Republican lawmaker’s lawsuit cited a Daily Caller article from August that revealed the Campaign for Accountability hired Fusion GPS as an “independent contractor” in 2018 and paid the firm close to $140,000 for research.
Nunes described Fusion GPS as “a political war room for hire that specializes in dirty tricks and smears” and the Campaign for Accountability as a “dark money, partisan, left-wing” nonprofit group targeting mainly conservatives.
Fusion GPS was hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2016 through the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS in turn hired Steele, who made allegations regarding Trump and Russia. Marc Elias, a Perkins Coie lawyer and the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, provided briefings to Clinton’s campaign related to Fusion GPS’s findings. Nellie Ohr, the wife of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was a contractor for Fusion in 2015 and 2016, and her Trump-Russia research was passed along by her husband to the bureau.
After special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released last April, Fusion GPS continued to insist that “to our knowledge, nothing in the Steele memoranda has been disproven.”
Nunes said Fusion GPS retaliated against him through the Campaign for Accountability in part because of subpoenas he issued to the bank the opposition research firm used which “revealed that the Clinton campaign, the DNC and Perkins Coie paid for Fusion GPS’s anti-Trump research.”
The congressman claimed that “corrupt acts of racketeering are part of Fusion GPS’s regular way of doing business,” and he said “that way of doing business must end here and now.”
