California Rep. Devin Nunes said Friday that he relishes attacks from his Democratic counterparts and the mainstream media over his push to release a memo laying out FISA abuses at the FBI and Justice Department.
“It’s actually quite enjoyable because we have the underlying facts,” Nunes said in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier.
Earlier in the day, his committee released a four-page document accusing the FBI and Justice Department of making “material and relevant” omissions in an Oct. 21, 2016 FISA application to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The memo says that the FISA application relied heavily on the infamous Steele dossier. That despite the FBI not having verified or corroborated its core claims about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
The application also “extensively” cited a Yahoo! News article that was based on the dossier itself. Yet the application “incorrectly” assessed that the article was not based on the dossier. (RELATED: FISA Warrant Relied On Dossier And News Stories Planted By Fusion GPS)
The memo also asserts that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told congressional investigators that the FISA against Page would not have been sought without the dossier. Democrats disputed that claim on Friday, but Nunes stood by it in his interview with Baier.
“It is definitely what he said,” Nunes said of McCabe, who left his position earlier this week. “Not to mention we have other witnesses who said very similar things.”
“The fact of the matter is that the main things that were used to go out and get this warrant was the dossier and the story that corroborated the dossier.”
Drama over the memo has played out since Jan. 18, when the Intel Committee voted along party lines to make the document available to all members of Congress. Since then, Nunes and other Republicans have led a push to release the memo to the public. The White House approved its release on Friday, and the committee released it soon after.
Some Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and California Rep. Adam Schiff, have called for Nunes’ removal as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. As Baier noted in his interview, others have accused Nunes of doing Russia’s bidding.
But Nunes said he is not concerned with the attacks because he believes that President Trump and his campaign did not collude with the Russian government during the election. And he said the attacks from the Left are coming out of desperation.
“They know there was no collusion,” he said of Democrats.
“We’ve been investigating this for a very long time. So you know you’re over the target because you’re being attacked from all sides,” he told Baier.
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