RUSH: It’s a great honor and a thrill to introduce to you the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Devin Nunes of California. I know you’ve been making the rounds, and you’re under assault. I appreciate you making time here, Congressman, to appear on the program today.
NUNES: Well, Rush, it’s an honor to be asked to be on your show, and I’m just glad that we still got conservatives out there who want to get to the truth, and so anywhere that I can go to get the message out, I’m more than glad to do it.
RUSH: Well, there are a lot of people that don’t want the truth, a lot of people trying to not stymie the truth; they are trying to trash the truthers and people are coming after you almost as viciously as they’re going after President Trump. Now, I’ve spent the last couple of hours detailing your memo and what I think some of the highlights are. But I want to ask you, what do you think is the most significant revelation in this memo?
NUNES: Well, I think the bottom line is is how they used the political intelligence, political dirt paid for by Clinton campaign, and it was funneled straight into the FBI and then used to spy on an American citizen, which was really designed to go after the Trump campaign. I mean, that is significant.
RUSH: Okay, explain how spying on Carter Page, because that’s who you mean, I presume, how is that going after Trump? Tell people how that works.
NUNES: So, by getting the warrant on Carter Page, I believe what they thought would happen is that they would have a whole trail of emails so they could go in, and with the warrant, they can go back and grab all of Mr. Page’s communications. And I’m assuming what they believed was there was gonna be a treasure trove of, you know, emails of Carter Page, you know, colluding with Russians and the Trump campaign, which of course was a big goose egg; there was nothing there. We know that because Carter Page hasn’t been charged with anything and the FISA warrant’s no longer on him.
So it was — and, look, this is scary stuff, right? I mean, these are secret courts. And I have long supported these because it’s mainly to go after terrorists and people abroad who are looking to do bad things. Never did I think that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would be used to go after a political campaign. And, you know, there’s gonna have to be some major reforms done to these programs. And what shocks me is that the people at these institutions aren’t worried about this.
I mean, you know, we have a hard enough time, Rush, trying to track down terrorists and bad guys around the world. And just the fact that they would have wasted our intelligence agencies’ time to go after somebody like Carter Page to try to get into the Trump campaign is really scary stuff and really a waste of taxpayer money, and I think every American should be concerned about this no matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat or don’t even pay attention to politics, you ought to care about this.
RUSH: Congressman Nunes, I mean, we’re all laymen here compared to you, but it appears that Donald Trump does represent a greater threat to some of these people than some of the terrorists that you are referring to here. I mean, you’re absolutely right. I sometimes doubt the real impact of this has hit even people who were supportive.
Stop and think what really happened here. We have a political candidate who lost the election, commissions an opposition research document, the Steele dossier, which is then packaged and presented as legitimate intelligence gathered by respected intelligence agents the world over, and it features such shocking details as the golden showers story. We find out that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC paid for this, $10 million. We find out that Steele did not even talk to these people in Russia in person on the phone.
We then find out that the FBI uses this to get a warrant, as you say, to spy on Carter Page. They did not tell the court that this was a political document. This is the kind of thing that movie scripts contain and are made of. It’s hard to get my arms around comprehending the number of people that had to be in on this and their motivation. Now, you may be nervous about going into motivation. To me, that is everything. Why? What’s the purpose here?
NUNES: Well, this gets to the bottom of what we’re looking at when you look at Peter Strzok and some of his text messages. You know, we still need to get to the bottom of what did the insurance policy mean? A lot of people, “Look, it’s just pure speculation at this point,” but it is very possible that the insurance policy was this counterintelligence investigation, and that would be really scary.
RUSH: But it isn’t just counterintelligence, it’s actually — they’re going after Trump criminally, are they not?
NUNES: Well, that’s not what they’re supposed to do, right? I mean, that’s not what a counterintelligence investigation, if you’ve talked to, you know, Andy McCarthy who writes for National Review, he said this numerous times, that a counterintelligence investigation is not criminal.
RUSH: Right. But this is. I mean, they’re trying to get President Trump paralyzed, impeached, convicted, thrown out. Everybody knows, Congressman, there would be no investigation of Russian interference if Hillary had won the election. Nobody would even be talking about it. Nobody would be worried about it. It would not even be a thing.
NUNES: Well, I think that’s true, but, you know, we were asked to look into Russian interference and to try to determine if there was any collusion between the Trump campaign. And, you know, the attacks on me started a year ago. So I would — you know, I said, “Well, look. I’ve seen all of this intelligence. Yeah, we know the Russians are bad, and we know the Russians are up to no good. But I never saw any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” And so I would say things like that, and I would just get attacked viciously by the left.
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: And then, you know, you’re well aware of how they planted crap on me and basically accused me of leaking information, which was totally false. They had no evidence. And what was supposed to be just take a few days to clarify, they stretched it to nine months to try to keep me from running the Russia investigation. So I was well aware of what they were willing to do to take someone out, which makes it obvious that you’re over the target, right?
So once I knew that they were going after me when all I was doing was speaking the truth, I knew these characters were up to no good. So here we are in, you know, February of 2018 with absolutely no evidence of Trump colluding with Russians, but we have lots of evidence that everybody continues to ignore that the Hillary campaign was colluding with Russians. Because if you believe that Christopher Steele, who was paid by Hillary campaign, got his information from Russians — and we do believe that he did get some information from the Russians — I mean, there’s your collusion. And it just so happens that the stuff that came in, it’s salacious and unverified, as said by Director Comey, and we have not verified any of the crazy accusations, like the golden shower issue.
So that’s where we are right now. We continue to investigate. We continue to do interviews. But, I’ll tell you what, you know, every time we get in these interviews, the Democrats read every name in the Russian phone number to the witnesses, and of course they keep a running dry — drilling dry holes.
RUSH: Well, since there’s nothing to be found, I mean, I don’t want to lead you in any direction or put words in your mouth, but I’ve been trying to understand, okay, Russians interfered in the election. What did they do? What is the allegation? Whatever, whoever wanted you to investigate this, what was the suspicion? What did they do that they would not have done if Hillary had won the election? E, y
NUNES: Yeah. I mean, look, the Russians are notorious. There’s no question that they always try to play games in elections. Okay? But —
RUSH: Well, that’s always. This is not the first year.
NUNES: Yeah. There’s nothing new about that. But, you know, one of the things that we’re looking at in the Russia investigation in the House of Representatives, and this never gets covered by the mainstream media, but we are actually looking into did they collude with not just Trump, but did they collude with any other campaign. So, you know, and that’s what we’ve uncovered. The only thing we’ve uncovered so far in our investigation is the fact that Christopher Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton, who got information from Russians and funneled it to the FBI. So our investigation is uncovering things, and we are finding collusion. It’s just the mainstream media continues to ignore it —
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: — and they continue to attack me, the messenger, who’s just trying to get to the bottom of what happened.
RUSH: People ask me if I think the FISA court was misled during the application for the warrant, because we know that the FBI did not tell the FISA court — your memo clarifies, they didn’t tell the FISA court that this was a political document, that it was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton. They presented it as legitimate intelligence. So what is the court’s involvement here, if that’s in fact what did happen, if the FBI misrepresented their primary evidence in the warrant application and the court was essentially tricked or fooled, what is the remedy for that?
NUNES: So the easiest thing would be — the court could hold them in contempt. Now, typically a court never holds somebody in contempt, especially not DOJ and FBI, and this is part of the problem. You could lose your law license, you know, it’s a major problem if you lie to the court. You know, another option that some of my colleagues have called on, would be a special counsel to look into just what DOJ and FBI did, and then they could bring charges against some of these folks. You know, and we need to know, you know, where did the order come down from? Was this just a couple people, or did this come from above?
We just don’t know who made the decision, you know, not to present all the facts to the court. And the irony of the attacks, the relentless attacks on us are outstanding, right? So we were accused that we were gonna destroy our nation’s secrets and if we let the public know what really happened before the court that this was gonna do harm that would harm our national security. So we went to great lengths to reduce this down to just what the people needed to know, just the facts, here’s the facts, here’s the real abuse at the highest level that we see.
Well, now, we’re being criticized for not giving all the information. Well, we did that on purpose to try to just give the pertinent information. But I think, as you begin to peel this onion back, there’s more and more information out there, and you’re starting to see some of this is starting to explode as it deals with the State Department and the shenanigans that they were up to in 2016 also.
RUSH: Yeah, the unmasking; you had Samantha Power; you have Susan Rice, the record number of Americans unmasked toward the trail end of the Obama administration. I have to take a brief break here. We’ll come back and continue. Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee with us. Stay right where you are.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Welcome back with Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman, is there more to come? I’ve seen allusions to potentially four or five more memos that you might write, and then of course there’s the Democrat memo that Adam Schiff is talking about. So what’s yet to come here?
NUNES: Okay. So, first of all, you always have to love the narratives that the mainstream media creates. So they want to make this look like, “Oh, they’re just putting out a lot of these politically driven memos.” All right. So as I was saying in the last segment, we had to follow this process in the House because it was DOJ and FBI, and they can’t investigate themselves, right? So there’s no way that we can get this information. So you think if I sent this information to the DOJ and FBI, they were not gonna let it out, right? I mean, that’s why they — you know, they were doing anything and everything to keep the public from getting to know what actually happened —
RUSH: Yeah, but they’ve said since it’s nothing but a nothing burger. I mean, if it’s a nothing burger, why were they working so hard to prevent it coming out?
NUNES: Right. Right. So that’s exactly what happened. So now they’re trying to mock us, “Oh, they’ve got all these new memos.” So here’s the truth. So we had to use this process in order to let the American people know what happened in the 2016 election in terms of FISA abuse. So phase 1 of our investigation was just on the origins of the investigation and how we believe they abused the FISA. Phase 2 that we’re moving to now, I mean, we’ve been investigating for a very long time, but some of it’s starting to break out in the open because of a lot of work that Senator Grassley of Iowa is doing. And we are looking at the State Department and their involvement in some of the shenanigans in the 2016 election.
RUSH: This is the Obama State Department?
NUNES: The Obama State Department, yeah, back in 2016. So that is an ongoing investigation. There will be more to come on that. But I laugh that, you know, the mainstream media wants to turn this into a memo war, you know, and they’re promoting the Democrats’ memo and the headlines are always the mean Republicans are not letting the Democrats release their memo. Which, you know, the irony is the Democrats and everybody opposed us, you know, including DOJ and all the mainstream media, said we’re gonna destroy our nation’s secrets.
But now it’s okay to have the Democrats and Adam Schiff’s memo out. I mean, democracy does die in darkness. The problem is the darkness is emanating from the mainstream media themselves. I mean, they refuse, they absolutely refuse to cover the truth. They don’t want to cover it.
RUSH: Well, they’re not the media anymore, Congressman. This is really what you’re alluding to. The same bunch here that risked going to jail to publish the Pentagon papers, government secrets, is now doing everything it can to suppress the work done by the chairman of a committee of duly elected representatives of the people. I mean, the media’s clearly chosen sides. And their objective here is to stymie anybody who would promote the Trump agenda or damage the Obama agenda. And that’s just the reality of the world that you and everybody else has to deal with here.
NUNES: Yeah.
RUSH: It’s all part of the corruption of our great system.
NUNES: And, Rush, I think that’s exactly right. I’ve never seen anything like this before. You know, and I’ll even try to talk to some of these reporters. I try to deal with them, and you cannot get through to them. I mean, they’ve always been partisan, almost all of them are left wing, but, I mean, they go crazy. Almost every story is fake news. Almost every story that runs about me is fake. I mean, it’s unbelievable the stuff that is out there, and, you know, you try to go correct the record. Like I’ll tell some of them, they’ll, “You don’t talk to me anymore.”
I’m like, “Well, you haven’t corrected the 10 stories you wrote that are totally fake.” And, you know, I don’t know how you fix that. So pretty much all I can do is not talk to them because all they’ll do is take whatever I say and take it out of context. I mean, like the greatest one was from this morning, so I was on Fox & Friends, and of course I misspoke a little bit, right, where I said that Papadopoulos, you know, didn’t know Trump, right? So then the left immediately and all the media they put out, oh, no, there’s a picture of Donald Trump and Papadopoulos.
Okay. So sorry, mainstream media, there was a photo-op that everybody that’s there admits that it was a photo-op. Donald Trump and Papadopoulos did not have any, you know, other than just saying hello there. You know, it’d be like if I went to a U2 concert and I’m at the concert hall there, and I say that, you know, I’ve met all the members of U2. I mean, it doesn’t work that way.
RUSH: Well, Papadopoulos is just a stand-in for Carter Page and Manafort. When those things blew up, then they stumbled into this picture of Papadopoulos, he gets drunk and starts bragging to some ambassador about dirt on Hillary, and so since they’ve got nothing, they glom onto that. But, remember, people that watch ABC, CBS, and CNN and all that, read the New York Times, they don’t know who Fusion GPS is.
NUNES: Right. They’ve never been covered.
RUSH: They don’t know the basics of your memo. All they know that your memo is a nothing burger and that you are a partisan trying to prop up a perverted, boorish president and trying to unwind the great Barack Obama agenda. And that’s all they know about you.
NUNES: And you know, here’s an interesting — these are facts. So our memo, the Republican memo, when we made it available for all House members to read, nearly all the Republicans came down and read the memo. Only a handful of Democrats, like less than 10, read our memo.
RUSH: Of course.
NUNES: Okay? Of course the media never writes about that, never talks about that. Now the Democrats have their memo, okay, that they have, and we made it available for all members of the House to read. So do you realize that more Republicans have actually come down to read the Democratic memo than Democrats themselves have read their own memo.
RUSH: That’s because they know this memo’s a joke. It’s nothing more than an attempt to dilute and water down yours. Schiff doesn’t have anything. Look, I have to take a break here coming up. Hang on if you can for just a few more minutes. I know you’re busy, but we need to wrap it up in a professional manner, not like this, so don’t go away.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And welcome back. We wrap up here with Congressman Nunes. I thought of one more thing I wanted to run by you during the break. And it was… I played the audio sound bite of this earlier. It’s a former CIA counterintelligence muckety-muck guy named Phillip Mudd, and there have been two other people like him over the weekend saying to President Trump, “You know what? If you’re gonna pick a fight with the FBI, you don’t want to make those guys mad.
“They can really come after you.” And I’ve heard that before. The same thing has been said by Chuck Schumer to President Trump about the CIA, the intelligence community. I’m sure you’re getting the same kind of insults. Now, with people saying, “You better not make the FBI mad! They could really come out and do you damage or come after you,” doesn’t that kind of validate what’s already going on, if we have people advocating that the FBI be used as a weapon against political opponents?
NUNES: Yeah. So those days are over, Rush. That is what they did in the Obama administration. These institutions became corrupt at the top, and it’s not just the FBI. It’s all of the departments who became just out of control. I mean, do we have to go back to Lois Lerner and the IRS and all of those games that were played?
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: And what’s happening here is that the first time in a long time Congress — which is a separate branch of government. We created the FBI.
RUSH: Right!
NUNES: We created the Department of Justice.
RUSH: You could abolish them if you want to!
NUNES: We could abolish them. We could cut their money off. But the bottom line is this. I said, “We’re done. You cross the rubicon. You abused the FISA court.” And, you know, I had to fight for these documents for months and months and months. We issued the original subpoenas back in August of last year, and it took until just a few weeks ago for us to finally put all the pieces together. So, you know, I’m not gonna take their crap. I’m not gonna be threatened. They tried to do an end run around me, and Speaker Paul Ryan said, “No. The Congress is gonna exert our authority.”
And so, look, I believe between the Congress conducting proper oversight and with President Trump trying to drain the swamp, I believe we will get this corrected. But the longer it takes for them to admit they have a problem, the harder it’s gonna be to fix this. I think the right thing to do would be for DOJ — the Department of Justice — to come out and say, “Okay. Look, Congress. We got it.
“We made some mistakes. We clearly… You know, we may agree to disagree, but we understand that you don’t want us using political dirt paid for by one campaign to be used against another and open investigations on that campaign based on that dirt. We understand you don’t want that.” If they would just admit that, we’d probably be getting to the solution phase of our investigation.
RUSH: Congressman, look, you won’t find anybody more optimistic than I am, but they’re not gonna do anything like that through the rest of this year. Everybody that we’re talking about here has dreams of the Democrats winning the House back in 2018 and bringing to life all of these dreams they have about impeaching Trump and stringing you up and so forth. This is gonna get… It’s gonna stay vicious all the way through this year. And you’ve referenced the media. The media, they don’t do news anymore.
NUNES: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: And I’m not telling you anything.
NUNES: Yeah.
RUSH: They’re part of the opposition now. And I think, you know, your appearance here today is an indication to me of your fortitude and how great you are. The more the public can hear from you, the better. Unedited.
NUNES: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: You know, it’s just because you are genuine and you’re real and you care about this. And I know you’re busy, but the more time you can spend talking to people other than media outlets, the better our side is gonna be, because you are the guy with the knowledge. You know more than you can tell us even right now, and you know what’s coming, and I think everybody who knows you knows without a doubt that you wouldn’t put in that memo or anything else you’re gonna say about this anything that is not true that you can’t back up. There’s nothing in it for you to do that.
NUNES: That’s right, and not only that, I laugh about this when they say how short it is and how little we put in there. And I alluded to this a little bit earlier. You know, we actually… We would have liked to have put a lot more in there because there’s a lot more really bad stuff. And I guess that’s the thing, Rush, I would say is that I do have some level of optimism that ultimately DOJ will begin to do the right thing, right? I do think there are some ways out of this mess. The media? I agree. They are…
I mean, they’re wholly bought and paid for by the left. It’s embarrassing, actually, how bad they’ve become. But I do believe that some of these institutions… You know, look, the FBI? Everybody wants the FBI to be successful and do things right. So I think those problems could be fixed. I agree with you, though, that for half of America, a little less than half of America, they are gonna believe had to Trump colluded with Russia because he’s already been tried and convicted by the mainstream media. And it’s hard to get Americans turned around the other way.
RUSH: Yeah, but you still can’t define what Trump did. You can’t even explain it. Nobody can explain what the corruption, collusion conspiracy was. Did they mess with ballot boxes? They mess with voting machines? Did somebody get involved in the count? What do they do?
NUNES: Well, I can tell you what they do. (chuckling) They infiltrated the Hillary campaign and gave her a bunch of phony dirt on Trump and they were able to get it few the FBI and open a counterintelligence investigation.
RUSH: Exactly right. That’s where the collusion is. Exact. Well, look, Congressman, I really appreciate it again, and God bless you.
NUNES: Hey, thanks a lot, Rush, and I’d love be to be on again.
RUSH: Any time you want, you now have the number.
NUNES: Okay. (chuckling) I won’t give it to anybody.
RUSH: You’re one of five people who have the number.
NUNES: Well, thank you.
RUSH: So if a sixth person calls, we’re gonna know who gave it out.
NUNES: I appreciate that. (chuckling)
RUSH: All right. (chuckling) Congressman Devin Nunes of the House Judiciary Committee. He’s the chairman and the primary author of the memo.
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