Nunes warns GOP has subpoenas ready for FBI, DOJ figures if they win House

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Devin Nunes: Is FISA court trying to abolish itself?

Congressman Devin Nunes discusses the FISA court selecting David Kris, an Obama-era attorney, to oversee the FBI's implementation of reform

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.-- Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., warned Friday that Republicans have subpoenas “ready to go” if they take back the majority of the House of Representatives in November, saying they plan to continue investigating and interviewing top FBI and Justice Department (DOJ) officials involved in the Russia investigation.

In an interview with Fox News on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday, Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said it was difficult for people to “trust the FBI and DOJ” after the bureau’s initial Russia probe and former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s nearly two-year-long investigation.

That probe led to no evidence of a conspiracy or coordination between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election.

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“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 told Fox News.

Nunes went on to bash Democrats, specifically Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., for not taking action to make “reforms” to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process.

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“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.

“They’re doing everything they can to not make reforms and that’s not going to be sufficient,” he said.

Nunes and Republicans on the Intelligence Committee have been blasting Schiff and Democrats and accusing them of ignoring FISA abuse, following the release of a scathing Justice Department inspector general report that revealed significant misconduct.

Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz, in his Dec. 9, 2019 report, identified “17 serious shortcomings related to the conduct” of the surveillance of former Trump campaign foreign policy aide Carter Page, and that the FBI made repeated errors and misrepresentations before the FISA court, as they sought to monitor Page in 2016 and 2017.

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Page was a central figure in Mueller’s investigation. Mueller did not find any wrongdoing by Page and was unable to substantiate the anti-Trump dossier’s claims about him.

Horowitz’s report also confirmed that the FISA applications to monitor Page relied heavily on the now-infamous Trump dossier, authored by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign through law firm Perkins Coie.

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Last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) also released a newly declassified summary of a Justice Department assessment revealing at least two of the FBI’s surveillance applications to monitor Page lacked probable cause.

But for the time being, Nunes told Fox News that he and Republicans on the committee will continue to make recommendations to Democrats for reform to FISA.

“It is complicated to fix FISA,” Nunes told Fox News. “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.”

He added: “At the end of the day, they’re in charge.”