Rep. Devin Nunes cast himself in an interview Wednesday as a defender of the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies even as he declined to categorically rule out suggestions that the “deep state” is out to overthrow President Trump.
The California Republican, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, emphasized that his aim is to “clean up this mess” at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — a mess he blamed on a counterintelligence probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion by Trump or his associates that Nunes describes as flawed and begun on false pretenses.
Asked specifically if the probe, overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, is part of an organized effort to remove Trump from office, Nunes pointed to revelations that two agents previously assigned to the investigation engaged in discussions that have been interpreted that way. The agents have since testified that wasn’t their intent. They do not appear to have acted on their talk.
“If you read the people who were at the top, and you read their text messages and their emails, the people who were in charge of the day-to-day investigation of the Trump campaign supposedly colluding with the Russians, that was what they wanted to do, they wanted to stop him,” Nunes said in an expansive conversation with “Behind Closed Doors,” a Washington Examiner podcast.
Nunes added: “You said that I’m attacking the intelligence agencies. That’s the mainstream media. When I’m out in the field, I have not had one FBI agent do anything but come up to me and thank me for what I’m doing; same with many of the officers that I see from many of the other agencies. So I’m defending the FBI and the Department of Justice and we’re doing what it takes to try to clean up this mess.”
The congressman, a staunch Trump defender and chief antagonist of the Mueller probe, said he agreed with the intelligence agencies’ original conclusion from the summer of 2016 — that Putin was interfering in the presidential campaign “to sow discord.”
But Nunes, a Russia hawk who in the past has been critical of Trump’s attempts to cozy up to Moscow, said that he has never found credible the newer assessment, rolled out in December of 2016 — after the election — that Putin interfered to help this president win.
Nunes holds to that view despite the 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. “Look, by hurting Clinton, effectively you help the opposing candidate. Or do you just sow discord?” he said.
“Russian intelligence, Chinese intelligence, you pick the intelligence agency across the globe, they all had the same assessment, and I’ve not seen any of their assessments, OK? But I guarantee you they had the same assessment that every media person here, every pollster here in this town had, which was what? Hillary Clinton has this in the bag and the election’s over,” Nunes added. “So, why would Putin go and do anything to try to help Trump win? He would never even think that that’s remotely possible that Trump could win.”
Certain issues grate on Nunes in regard to the Mueller investigation, which began in-house at the FBI and was shifted to the special counsel after Trump fired James Comey as bureau director.
They include using the “Steel dossier” and Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, at least in part, to obtain special secret warrants from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge to investigate the president’s campaign. Nunes discusses those topics at length on “Behind Closed Doors.”
Additionally, the House Intelligence Committee chairman is still smarting over one of the first bombshells of this ongoing saga, revelations of a conversation that Michael Flynn, then-President-elect Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey Kislyak.
Mueller’s team, Nunes said, has never looked into the “felony” leak of a conversation between Flynn and Kislyak. The congressman said that he has determined that only as many as two dozen Obama administration officials had access to a recording of that call, and he blames the outgoing White House for unmasking Flynn leaking the call to reporters.
“I supported the Mueller investigation. But it’s hard to defend now when they’ve totally ignored the Flynn felony leak,” Nunes said. Flynn has since been charged and pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI as a part of the Mueller probe.
