With the approach of Monday’s 5 p.m. deadline for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to produce documents related to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into election meddling by Russia, the top Republican on a key congressional committee has a basic question.
“What we’re asking for is, we want to know who’s in charge — Wray or Rosenstein, or neither?” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said Monday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”
Nunes was referring to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The fact that Nunes does not already know the answer to this question definitively is a testament to the protracted tug of war between DOJ officials and congressional oversight leaders, regarding the origins of the probe that eventually led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
After tensions escalated and congressional Republicans issued multiple subpoenas, DOJ officials agreed to produce documents by Monday at 5 p.m.
Nunes, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he and other Republican representatives on Friday at midnight received a “strange letter” from a lower-level FBI official that calls the chain of command into question.
“Number two, we want to know if they ran informants — either one or more, and how much they were paid,” he said. “It’s something we’ve been asking for months. And they refuse to answer the question. It’s very simple.”
From news reports, the FBI used at least one informant to gather information about President Donald Trump’s campaign for president. That man, Stefan Halper, is a former CIA official who reportedly made contact with low-level Trump adviser George Papadopoulos.
More recently, The Washington Post reported that a Russian named Henry Greenberg — who had worked with the FBI in the past — offered to sell dirt on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to Trump adviser Roger Stone.
“It appears that every day that goes by, it appears to be more and more and more people that look like, that have connections to the intelligence agencies that were running into Trump campaign associates … We’ve got people coming out of the woodwork,” Nunes said. “Because now everybody’s coming to us saying, ‘Hey, I met this weird person who was offering dirt on Clinton. Was this person an FBI or CIA , you know, secret agent or informant or spy?'”
Related: Goodlatte Says DOJ and FBI Face New Document Deadline
That seems to be the case in Greenberg’s contact with Stone, Nunes said.
“That’s another example of someone who appeared like they have some connection to our intelligence agencies, that clearly was trying to sell dirt on Hillary to the Trump campaign well before” Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer system or Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s iPhone, Nunes said.
Nunes said the contacts in early 2016 cast doubt on former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony that the bureau opened its counterintelligence probe in July of that year.
“That was their story,” he said. “That’s what they’ve stuck to. It just doesn’t hold water anymore.”
PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.
(photo credit, homepage and article images: Devin Nunes [1], [2], CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)
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