Nunes Targets 10 Obama Administration Cronies for Surveillance Abuse on Trump
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has called for open hearings for ten former State Department and Obama White House officials for alleged surveillance abuses against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in a Monday letter to the chairmen of the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees.
“During this investigation, the Committee discovered matters that likely fall within the purview of the joint task force of the Committees on Oversight & Government Reform and the Judiciary,” Nunes wrote in the letter to Rep. Bob Goodlatte and Rep. Trey Gowdy.
“For the sake of transparency and to keep the American people as fully informed as possible about these matters, the task force should consider interviewing these people in an open setting.”
The people listed are as follows: Elizabeth Dibble, Jonathan Finer, Colin Kahl, Kathleen Kavalec, Lewis Lukens, Shailagh Murray, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Thomas Williams, Jonathan Winer.
Dibble is the former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London, according to The Daily Caller. Dibble reportedly received information about a May 2016 meeting between George Papadopoulos and Alexander Downer.
According to Downer, who served as the Australian high commissioner in the U.K. at the time, Papadopoulos told him that the Russian government had information on Hillary Clinton’s emails. Papadopoulos had received that information from professor Joseph Mifsud.
Since then, Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the meetings, though he did inform them about the references to the dirt on Clinton.
Nuland, the former assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Winer, the former special envoy to Libia, handled information that has since been important for the FBI’s Russia probe. Nuland told the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 20 that she reviewed the dossier in July 2016, and during the same month approved an FBI legal team to go meet with the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele.
Winer was also a Senate staffer for former Secretary of State John Kerry and met with Steele in 2016. He returned from the meeting with a two-page summary of the dossier for State Department officials and also spoke to reporters about the dossier.
Finer was the chief of staff to Kerry, Kavalec was Nuland’s deputy, Lukens is the current deputy chief of mission at London embassy, Williams replaced Dibble as the deputy chief of mission, and Sullivan was former Secretary of State Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser.
The other two names mentioned are Kahl and Murray who served as aides to former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Both Kahl and Murray were sent a questionnaire about what they knew about the dossier.
Nunes sent a similar letter to Gowdy and Goodlatte last Friday recommending 17 current and former Department of Justice and FBI officials be interviewed for surveillance abuse, The Washington Examiner reported.
These names include former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, former associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok.
Strzok has since been issued a subpoena to openly testify before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committee on July 10. His attorney, Aitn Goelman, said that Strzok will not accept the invitation to testify.
“Having sharpened their knives behind closed doors, the committee would now like to drag back Special Agent Strzok and have him testify in public — a request that we originally made and the committee denied,” Goelman said in a letter to the committee. “What’s being asked of Special Agent Strzok is to participate in what anyone can recognize as a trap.”
Nunes remains adamant about finding the truth, despite criticism from Democrats, according to Breitbart.
“So, I tend to ignore everything that they say. We continue to do our work every day, day in and day out, to get to the truth. And gradually we’re getting to the truth,” Nunes said on Fox News Monday. “And I believe as these hearings take place and testimony is given to the Congress, I think it will be a much-needed sunlight in this investigation. I think the American people are being deceived — who is telling the truth, and who is not telling the truth.”
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