High-ranking member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, R-Calif., Told “Sunday Morning Futures” in an exclusive interview that “we have now expanded our research, full research, at the Brookings Institute.”
Nunes made the comment a day after the main source for Christopher Steel’s unverified file was revealed to be a United States resident who once co-wrote an investigative paper showing that Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized his dissertation.
The presenter Maria Bartiromo said Sunday that “Nunes was one of the first legislators to question the deception of Russian collusion as then chairman of the committee of the Intel Chamber.” She noted that three years ago she said “that the FBI participated in a coup to overthrow a sitting president.”
She noted a Fox Business interview last week where Nunes said for the first time that he believes there were “direct links between the leadership of the Brookings Institute and the creation, possibly, of the Steele dossier and the dissemination of the Steele dossier.”
On Sunday, Nunes provided an update after a lawyer for 42-year-old Igor Danchenko confirmed to The New York Times that his client, a former research analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and not a “based” source in Russia, “he provided the information to Steele, the former British spy whose file was used by the FBI to obtain wiretaps from Carter Page, Trump’s former campaign adviser.
The FBI knew who Danchenko was and interviewed him in 2017 about the information he provided for the Steele dossier that was intended to show the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian government. Danchenko cooperated on condition that the FBI keep his identity a secret in order to protect himself, the newspaper reported.
But all of that changed when Attorney General William Barr ordered the FBI to declassify the report on his three-day interview with Danchenko and hand it over to Senator Lindsey Graham, RS.C., whose Judicial Committee has been investigating the origins of Russia Investigation . Graham wanted the interview to come out because it further undermines the credibility of Steele’s record, he said.
Graham released the declassified documents on July 17 that had redacted Danchenko’s name and identifying information, but an online blog post titled “I Found the Primary Source” gathered clues and identified Danchekno. RT, a Kremlin-owned news site, later published an article that also mentions Danchenko’s name.
Danchenko’s identity raises further questions about the FBI’s renewal of an order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) against Page. In the last two requests for renewal before the FISA court, the FBI referred to the document’s primary source as “truthful and cooperative” and “Russian-based,” according to the Justice Department Inspector General report.
But Danchenko lives in the United States, although he visited Moscow to collect information on behalf of Steele, the Times reported.
Nunes noted an interview he did with Bartiromo a couple of months ago where he “talked about how we were really looking at three Russians.”
“It ends … the third was actually not Russian at all. Actually, it looks like he lives here in the United States and the FBI led Congress to believe, and the media led Congress and the American public to believe that somehow Steele had this really super secret source that no one could know “he continued.
“Well, he ends up working for the Brookings Institute. It seems like there were a lot of connections to the Brookings Institute. “
He went on to explain that the Brookings Institute “is the prominent left-wing think tank here in our nation’s capital.”
Nunes noted that “we had these links before.”
“People can remember the Brookings president in 2016, we know he had released the file to some people, we had it as testimony,” he said. “You may also recall that the State Department was involved and that there were other records that were not Steele’s, except that they reflected Steele’s.”
“And we believe there is a connection between the President of Brookings and the records that were turned over to the State Department that reflected Steele’s records,” he continued.
SENATE REPUBLICANS PUBLISH FILES SAYS THE DOSSIER OF ‘UNDERCUT’ STEELE
Nunes then explained what he believes “all this” means.
“This was the dossier of the Clinton campaign. It was the dirt. It was a false story that they sold not only to the American people, but they sold it and corrupted it to our FBI, where it seems that these dirty cops were more than willing to take this information to present it to the FISA court, ”said Nunes.
He added: “We have now expanded our research, full research, at the Brookings Institute and it really focuses on two issues.”
“One is the IRS. This is a tax exempt organization. They are supposed to be kept out of politics. They clearly have not. They have obstructed our investigation with propaganda for the past four years, “said Nunes. “It is well known that they have attacked our investigation for four years through this type of bogus legal group of data verifiers they established. So we have to look there to see if they are involved in politics.”
Dean Patterson, an IRS spokesman, told Fox News: “Federal law prohibits the IRS from discussing specific taxpayers.”
Nunes said the second problem is that the Brookings Institute allegedly accepts “foreign money from foreign countries and foreign governments.”
“We need to know which foreign governments were involved in this because, were they acting on behalf of a foreign power?” Nunes said.
“Everyone has questioned all this time, if the Trump campaign, the Republicans, were involved with the Russians, well, who was the Brookings Institute, who were its foreign donors? And are they doing all this not only to help the Democratic Party, but also any foreign government?
A spokesperson for the Brookings Institute did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Bartiromo said: “What all this tells me, including the revealed source, is that there was indeed collusion in this country, but it was collusion with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.” Then she asked Nunes if that’s “a fair statement.”
“Yes, and it also serves to show you that this was a sick fantasy that was created by the Clinton campaign and its agents,” Nunes said in response.
Marisa Schultz of Fox News contributed to this report.
