Devin Nunes will not give up on his quest to see those who tried to torpedo Trump and overturn an election held to account.
Look, we either have a democracy or we do not. We cannot allow what happened in 2016 - from the Russians or from the deep state - to happen again.
Nunes has promised to get to the bottom of the whole sordid affair and he is getting closer every day. From The Washington Examiner: Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., believes he has found the definition of the “insurance policy.”
A text message sent by former FBI agent Peter Strzok to Lisa Page, a former FBI lawyer with whom Strzok was having an affair, in August 2016 that mentioned an “insurance policy” has long been a subject of concern among Republican investigators who believe there could have been a plot to undermine then-candidate Donald Trump.
In an interview Tuesday with Fox News, Nunes tied the “insurance policy” text to the FBI’s use of an unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to wiretap Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“We believe that insurance policy is not just about investigating the Trump campaign,” Nunes said. “We believe it’s to ensure that they were able to get the FISA warrant on Carter Page so they could go in and look at the emails in the campaign.”
Although the initial FISA application in October 2016 was marked as being a “verified application,” FBI officials later acknowledged that the dossier’s claims were not confirmed. In public testimony after he was fired in May 2017, former FBI Director James Comey called at least some of the dossier’s allegations “salacious and unverified.”
Last year Comey was challenged about the dossier’s use in the FISA warrants in an interview with Fox News. “My recollection was, it was part of a broader mosaic of facts that were laid before the FISA judge to obtain a FISA warrant,” he said.
With Comey’s “mosaic” in mind, Nunes said the evidence that sought to corroborate the dossier was equally as troubling.
“On the FISA application, remember, you have Comey who has called this a mosaic. So Comey’s mosaic,” Nunes said. “Remember when we came out with our memo that brought forward the fact that they had used the Clinton-paid-for dossier, the dirt, opposition research, and then they leaked that to press outlets and then they picked up those press reports and used it in the FISA application. Comey said, ‘Oh, no no it was a mosaic, there was so much more information there.’ Well there is more information there that we think is equally as bad as using opposition research.”
A February 2018 memo from the House Intelligence Committee, then led by Nunes, alleged Steele was paid over $160,000 by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign through the Perkins Coie law firm and opposition research group Fusion GPS to “obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.” The memo also said the FBI never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of the dossier’s Democratic benefactors or Steele’s anti-Trump bias when it applied to spy on Page, who was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller over his interactions with Russians but was never charged.
