By Zachary Stieber
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said on Dec. 20 he’s calling for a criminal referral because “somebody needs to pay a price” for the improper investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump and his campaign.
Senators last week released a new batch of text messages sent in 2016 by then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok.
“These are kind of the text messages that we’ve all been waiting for, that we knew probably existed, that, given the hard evidence, that our investigation really needed several years ago,” Nunes said.
The messages showed that the FBI was already investigating Trump on July 29, 2016. The FBI has never disclosed it was probing Trump this early.
“We know the FBI was lying to Congress because we knew that they did not open this investigation because of Papadopoulos and [that] then they opened it on July 31” of that year, Nunes said. “That was always nonsense. There was plenty of evidence of that. And here we have a text message that was clearly relevant to our investigation that they hid from us.”
Nunes, who was speaking on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” said the new messages show clear lying and obstructing of Congress.
“We’re going to have to do another criminal referral,” he said.
The FBI declined to comment to The Epoch Times.
The new messages also show Trump campaign associate George Papadopoulos “was so mistreated, it’s just unbelievable,” the top Republican on the House Intelligence committee said.
“This is really, really bad, and somebody needs to needs to pay a price for it,” he added.
Nunes said he expects his investigative team to make new connections as they use the newly released messages and plug them into the big picture created from information obtained in the past.
Hope for prosecutions rests on special counsel John Durham, he indicated.
“I’m just hopeful that Durham’s actually going to do something,” he said, adding that Republicans should push to make sure a potential Biden administration doesn’t fire Durham, who is probing the origins of Crossfire Hurricane.
“Because we know what the Democrats have been willing to do in the past in terms of meddling with elections, like for example, tarmac meetings in Phoenix, for example,” he said, referring to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch meeting with former President Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Arizona in June 2016, as the FBI probed Clinton’s wife, Hillary Clinton.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who hasn’t spoken about the newly released messages, didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
