Nunes is DONE Playing Nice with the DOJ and Just Issued This Brutal Ultimatum
Devin Nunes is fed up with the DOJ and their slow-walking of subpoenaed documents.
Nunes is now laying the smackdown and will refuse to go to any meetings with the DOJ
where they don't release documents.
From Washington Examiner
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., on Sunday said he ignored
an invitation by the Justice Department to continue talks Friday with government officials
about documents he seeks related to the Russia investigation because he was sure someone
at the agency was leaking.
"We're not going to go to another meeting where we don't get documents, and then the
meeting leaks out," Nunes said during an interview on Fox News' "Sunday Morning
Futures" with Maria Bartiromo.
In recent weeks, Nunes subpoenaed the Justice Department for documents concerning an American
who was a confidential intelligence source for Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
The subpoena came after the agency did not reply to a letter asking for details on Mueller's
probe.
But the DOJ, backed by the White House, did not provide the documents, informing Nunes
earlier this month that providing the information would threaten the life of the source and
jeopardize national security.
Instead he got a briefing with government officials, along with Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.,
the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
Though Nunes and Gowdy said they had a "productive" meeting and looked forward to future discussions,
Nunes did not respond to an invitation from the DOJ to answer questions he posed last
week in a follow-up meeting Friday.
Nunes explained Sunday that he and Gowdy did not accept the invite because they found out
they would not be receiving the documents they wanted.
A Justice Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner, "The FBI was prepared
to answer his questions last week, but they can't do that if he won't talk to us."
During the Fox News interview, Nunes also said that had they gone, leaks about an supposed
FBI informant who had contacts with President Trump's campaign would be pinned on them.
Two reports published Friday evening, one by the New York Times and the other by the
Washington Post, describe the informant in question as an American academic who teaches
in the United Kingdom and met with up to three members of the Trump campaign to look into
their ties to Russia.
These include campaign advisers Carter Page, who was surveilled by the government via Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, and George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty last
year to lying to the FBI and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Mueller's investigation.
The FBI reportedly launched its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election
after it got word that Papadopoulos learned that the Russians obtained thousands of former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails months before WikiLeaks published them.
Both the Times and the Post said they identified the informant, but declined to identify the
person heeding concerns of national security officials that the individual's life and
the lives his his or her sources would be placed in danger.
However, subsequent reporting indicated the informant was a Cambridge University professor.
Trump and his allies have accused this informant of possibly having political motives to hurt
his campaign.
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