Mark Levin hosted an interview with Devin Nunes.
The exchange between the two was fascinating.
Levin walked through sequences, establishing fact sets and building a de facto legal case.
The video was posted in three parts. I highlight portions from each.
Part One:
At the 3:08 mark:
LEVIN: What changed in October? Was it not the Steele Dossier that they used with the federal FISA Court to convince a federal judge to issue a warrant?
NUNES: Clearly the Dossier was used…It was the bulk of the [FISA] Application. What’s interesting about that article, like many of these articles, is that we now know that they were somewhat true. We don’t know if everything in that article was true but clearly somebody, somewhere knew that a counterintelligence investigation had been opened and that a warrant had been granted.
At the 5:00 minute mark.
NUNES: It has to be at the highest levels of government to approve a counterintelligence investigation on an American Citizen – FBI Director, Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, head of the National Security Division.
LEVIN: Do we know if the Presidential Daily Briefing included this information?
NUNES: In the Presidential Daily Briefing there would have been nothing. There was no intelligence out there at all…None of that existed…But the fact of the investigation, that’s another question that we still don’t have the answers to.
LEVIN: Is it because the Executive Branch won’t let you look at the Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefings.
Here it gets interesting. Nunes sidesteps completely.
NUNES: Right now we have out a questionnaire that we’re waiting for the answers on…We’re asking those very questions: When did you know the Dossier was funded by the Democratic Party. Did you brief President Obama.
Note that Nunes didn’t answer the actual question. He jumps to his 10 Questions. Nunes doesn’t answer for a reason.
I think Nunes has seen Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefings – as noted in my April 2, 2017 article and elsewhere.
Nunes is choosing not to answer that question. Which implies something is ongoing that he does not want to reveal at this time.
Around the 8:30 mark, Levin begins to close in the Obama White House – what Obama knew and when.
At the 8:53 mark:
LEVIN: Is it possible that everybody in the Obama Administration…knew about it…and the President didn’t know about at least some of this?
NUNES: …It’s hard to believe when you have all of the people you mentioned earlier signing off on this investigation – how would they [Obama] not know about the existence of the Dossier?
LEVIN: Why would you keep that from the President of the United States…
NUNES: This was also a product of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign. They also had the Dossier.
Jumping to the 13:00 minute mark, Levin continues to close in on the Obama White House.
LEVIN: One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretap communications have been provided to the White House. The White House keeps coming up here.
NUNES: Mmm-hmm.
LEVIN: It’s an illegal felony leak that exposes what I would argue is the conspiracy within the Obama Administration to take down that campaign, to tarnish a President-Elect and to continue the campaign against the President-Elect when he becomes President of the United States.
Levin then touches on the timing of Obama’s NSA Data-sharing Order.
I’ve written about this several times. I think it’s more important than has been acknowledged.
From The Strategic Delay of Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333:
Prior to the formal signing of Section 2.3, greater latitude existed within the White House in regards to collection of information – especially in relation to the Trump Campaign.
Thus, the delay in implementation. The Obama White House specifically delayed signing Section 2.3 until the final days of the Administration – after every possible byte of information had been collected.
Once signed into effect, Section 2.3 granted broad latitude to inter-agency sharing of information.
By the time the new order was signed on January 3, 2017, all information was already in the Obama White House’s possession.
I first wrote about this in early April 2017 in The Suspicious Timing of Obama’s NSA Data-Sharing Order.
I thought it important at the time. I still think it’s important now.
Part Two:
In the first part of this section the role of the press is discussed, along with the Michael Flynn leak and how Sally Yates used the Logan Act as a means to ignore the seriousness of the intelligence leaks.
At the 1:14 mark:
LEVIN: Are you shocked that you’re the target of attacks rather than people encouraging you to pursue this.
NUNES: I’m shocked and I’m scared – not personally – I’m scared for our country. All of the leaks that you just showed, it floors me that no serious investigation has been done on any of this.
One item I would note at this point. Nunes has been walled off from the Inspector General’s Investigation along with Session’s Leak Investigation. There are currently 27 separate investigations into political leaking ongoing.
At the 8:10 mark:
NUNES: Was Sally Yates really telling the White House that we have General Flynn under investigation for the Logan Act. Did that really happen? I’d like to know the answer to that question.
At the 11:08 mark:
LEVIN: We’re talking about the most egregious case of domestic surveillance of an opposition candidate by a President of the United States and his opposition, Hillary Clinton.
At the 13:20 mark:
LEVIN: My argument to you, sir, is this goes right to the top. The president [Obama] may not know all the particulars, but he had to know a hell of a lot from the public record and from his own people. What do you say?
NUNES: It’s hard to believe that she [Rice] didn’t know that. The letter that she writes to herself on January 20th [2017], hours before the Trump administration comes into power, it doesn’t make any sense other than to say it must have been some type of way to justify whatever actions were taken or cover something up.
Part Three:
At the 0:15 mark:
LEVIN: You’ve had great difficulty in getting information. Explain please.
NUNES: This has been the challenge historically for Congress. Once they create something it’s hard to oversee it, it’s hard to shut it down, it’s hard to control it…This is the first time in a long time where you’ve seen Congress really use our authority, use our power, go all the way to the courts to get information to try to rein in out-of-control bureaucracies…this should alarm people at what it’s taken for us to get to the bottom of this fiasco that’s occurred.
At the 2:14 mark:
LEVIN: You get confidential and secret information. To see what has taken place in the Executive Branch under the prior administration…and to see one newspaper after another, one opinion writer after another defending it and attacking you.
NUNES: This is part of the Democratic Party’s network…The media in this country is dead. It no longer exists, and the American people need to understand this.
At the 5:25 mark:
LEVIN: Where do you and your Committee go from here.
NUNES: We’re in what I call Phase II of this investigation – we’re looking at the State Department…There appears to be this additional Dossier.
LEVIN: Hold it. There may be another Dossier? Does the FBI have this other Dossier?
NUNES: This is what we’re investigating. We only know what these people have said to the media…I’m just telling you what they’ve said after we announced that we were looking at the State Department…We are preparing that piece of our investigation because we want to find – was the State Department getting information on American Citizens and feeding that over into the Justice Department.
LEVIN: This was widespread…
At the 9:12 mark:
NUNES: The irony is, it was the Republicans, it was me specifically, who had warned them about the Russians in April of 2016…And nobody seemed to be interested in it until after they lost an election.
LEVIN: Do they have any interest at all about the Russia relationship with Fusion GPS and the Clinton Campaign?
NUNES: Well you would think. That’s the obvious evidence that we have of collusion in this case that nobody seems to be investigating. If Christopher Steele got his information from Russians that’s a pretty good tie between the Clinton Campaign and the Russians.
Nunes repeatedly uses the phrase “it’s hard to believe” during the interview – especially when asked about denials from various officials in the Obama Administration regarding knowledge of the dossier or its use. He’s done this in other interviews as well.
I think Nunes already has evidence of who knew what and when. I think his 10 Questions are a baited trap as we move into Phase II.
newer post The Inspector General’s Case for a Special Counsel
older post Mike Shellenberger – A Throwback Democrat Running for California Governor