Nunes Says Subpoenas Ready To Go, Will Hit 'Dirty Cops' in FBI, DOJ
There are likely a lot of people in the FBI and Department of Justice who are desperately hoping the GOP doesn’t regain control of the House this autumn.
In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member on the House Intelligence Committee, said the GOP has subpoenas “ready to go” for “dirty cops” in the federal government who worked on the investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
Nunes gave the Fox interview from the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, where he was appearing with former Secret Service agent and commentator Dan Bongino to talk about developments in the Russia investigation.
Nunes indicated looking into Russia would be a Day One prerogative for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.
“You can be sure of this, if we take the House in November, we have subpoenas ready to go that will continue going after these dirty cops,” Nunes said.
He added that it was difficult for people to “trust the FBI and DOJ” after the Russia probe during and after the 2016 election and the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation that followed.
Nunes, a key ally of President Donald Trump, has long been critical of the process by which the FBI obtained a warrant from the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
An inspector general’s report found 17 abuses by the FBI and Department of Justice in using the Christopher Steele dossier in obtaining the warrant, according to the Washington Examiner.
That dossier, which is almost entirely unverified, was assembled as opposition research at the behest of Trump’s political opponents, including the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The Justice Department would later find two out of four of the warrants to be invalid, the Washington Examiner reported in January.
Nunes told Fox he would hold the feet of FBI and DOJ officials who were responsible for the investigation to the fire.
“What they’re trying to do is a cover-up — they’re trying to cover up the fact that their party was involved in the biggest political scandal in modern U.S. history, where they fed disinformation, likely Russian disinformation, from a campaign into the FBI and opened an investigation on the other campaign,” Nunes said.
He also criticized the lack of FISA reform since then.
“They’re doing everything they can to not make reforms and that’s not going to be sufficient,” he said.
Given that they’re in the minority, the Republicans will be working right now to help fix the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, although Nunes conceded it was a thorny issue.
“It is complicated to fix FISA,” he said.
“We’re going to give all of the information. We have a lot of ideas, we want to see those ideas and give them sunlight, so we’re going to give those ideas to Democratic leadership and they can choose to negotiate with us or do nothing.
“At the end of the day, they’re in charge,” he said.
However, while Democrats have expressed desultory concern over the report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz about the Russia investigation, there hasn’t been much action to actually reform FISA so that something like this doesn’t happen again.
Of course, subpoenas would go a long way toward fixing this and one hopes that the Republicans retake the House this November and we can finally start seeing them. Granted, they would be happening almost five years after the Russian investigation began, which is yet another significant difficulty.
However, if Nunes is ready to deal with the “dirty cops” — something he’s talked about doing on a number of occasions — it would a welcome development. It’s high time some chickens came home to roost.
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