The ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee revealed more details about the now-concluded special counsel investigation’s guidelines, saying on Thursday that Mueller’s second scope memo was based on the unverified Steele dossier nearly in its entirety.
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News he’d reviewed still-classified materials related to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memos outlining the breadth of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. He said the bulk of the information in the second scope memo came from the dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through funding from the Clinton campaign and the DNC during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Nunes claimed today that the allegations about Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort in the second scope memo were based on the dossier.
“We’d long, as Republicans, said, wait a second, you have no evidence here of collusion. You used the dossier for the second scope memo. DOJ, FBI stonewalled us. Mueller stonewalled us. Now we’ve finally been able to see it,” Nunes said.
The second scope memo, which was kept secret for many months and is still mostly redacted, was written by Rosenstein in August 2017, months after the first. In it, Rosenstein told Mueller that the first memo “was worded categorically in order to permit its public release without confirming specific investigations involving specific individuals” while this second scope memo “provides a more specific description of your authority” and was meant to outline which allegations “were within the scope of the investigation at the time of your appointment and are within the scope of the order.”
The second scope memo also laid out a number of yet-unknown investigative targets. The only individual in that memo who has been made public is Manafort, whom Rosenstein said Mueller could investigate based upon allegations that he colluded with Russian government officials with respect to their efforts to interfere with the 2016 election and that he received payments from the Ukrainian government before and during the tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych.
The first scope memo, which was immediately made public, was written by Rosenstein in May 2017 when he first appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. Rosenstein said Mueller would look at any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Trump, any matters that arose directly from the investigation, and anything else within the scope of the DOJ’s special counsel regulations.
The congressman also addressed the report about a possible third scope memo.
“I don’t know if it’s a third scope memo,” Nunes said. “But what it looked to me like, as somebody who has read it, is it looked like a CYA [cover your ass] memo.”
Nunes said that the Mueller report “talk[ed] about this expanded investigation and they list[ed] a bunch of names in there.”
“But it looks to me like they wanted a reason — there must’ve been a legal reason why they needed an addendum to this,” Nunes said. “Because my guess is that they expanded this so far and wide.”
Mueller’s report, a redacted version of which was released in April, stated that he did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been investigating alleged FISA abuse related to Steele and the FBI since the spring of 2018. Attorney General William Barr, along with his right-hand man U.S. Attorney John Durham, is taking a broader look at the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation.
“We will get the full picture, that I am quite sure of,” Nunes said on Thursday. “We have sent eight criminal referrals over to DOJ. I expect some of those will be acted on. And I think the big question is how many people will ultimately be prosecuted in this.”
