In Attempt to Learn How Much Mueller Knows about Roger Stone’s “Collusion,” Devin Nunes Blames FBI for Stone and Michael Caputo’s Perjury to HPSCI

On Thursday, in the wake of the release of the DOJ IG Report showing that Jim Comey hurt Hillary Clinton with his intervention after the end of the email server investigation, the Gang of Eight met with Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray to discuss the House Intelligence Committee demand for documents allegedly investigating FISA abuse.

On Thursday night, Rudy Giuliani (whose receipt of leaks from the NY FBI field office received no attention in the IG Report) appeared on Sean Hannity and argued that the Mueller investigation (which removed Strzok once his inappropriate texts were revealed) should be suspended immediately and instead investigated by those very same NY FBI agents.

Every FBI agent should demand that that man be fired and tomorrow Mueller should suspend his investigation and he should go see Rod Rosenstein who created him and the Deputy Attorney General and Attorney General Sessions who should now step up big time to save his Department should suspend that investigation.  Throw out all the people is that have been involved in the phony Trump investigation and bring in honest FBI agents from the New York office who I can trust implicitly and they should turn their attention to Comey, Strzok, Page.

[snip]

Who are we providing them to? People who have already concluded to frame Donald Trump, agents who started a phony Russia investigation. That’s the whole core of this. That’s why the investigation should be suspended. And I am talking for myself now, not the president. But I believe he would agree with this. A very serious investigation has to be done of the FBI agents at the very top by FBI agents who are honest in order to prosecute them…

Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions have a chance to redeem themselves and that chance comes about tomorrow. It doesn’t go beyond tomorrow. Tomorrow, Mueller should be suspended and honest people should be brought in, impartial people to investigate these people like Peter Strzok. Strzok should be in jail by the end of next week.

On Friday, in the wake of the Thursday Gang of Eight meeting, Paul Ryan, Devin Nunes, Trey Gowdy, and Bob Goodlatte had a meeting with Wray and Rosenstein to demand documents on their investigation into alleged FISA abuse.

Also on Friday, Roger Stone appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show to comment on the IG Report. He made no comment about the story he was seeding with the WaPo, spinning that the Russian he reached out to learn about dirt on Hillary Clinton, whom he didn’t mention when the House Intelligence Committee asked him about contacts with Russians, was actually an FBI spy. In its story this morning, the WaPo didn’t point out all the reasons why it’s almost certain that “Henry Greenberg” was not operating under the control of the FBI; as a result, the WaPo gave the informant story credibility it shouldn’t have.

Today, Devin Nunes went on Fox to report on the Friday meeting. In three segments (one, two, three), Maria Bartiromo treated the Friday meeting as breaking news. Nunes said that their subpoenas “will be complied with” or the House would take other measures. When Bartiromo asked Nunes specifically what he was looking for, he didn’t respond. Instead, he posed the quest this way.

How did you use our nation’s counterintelligence capabilities. These are capabilities used to track terrorists and other bad guys around the globe. How did you weaponize that against a political campaign, against the Trump campaign, where ultimately it ended up in Carter Page having a FISA warrant put against him which allowed the government to go in and grab all of his emails and phone calls. So that’s primarily what we’ve been investigating for many many months. I will tell you that Chairman Gowdy was very very clear with the Department of Justice and FBI and said that if there was any vectoring of any informants or spies or whatever you want to call them into the Trump campaign before the investigation began, we better know about it by Sunday, meaning today. He was very very clear about that. And as you probably know there’s breaking news this morning that now you have a couple Trump campaign people who are saying that they were, that they’ve amended their testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, they sent in both Friday night and this morning, amendments to their testimony saying that in fact they feel like somebody, they’re not claiming that it was the FBI, but someone ran informants or spies into them to try to get information and offer up Russian dirt to the Trump campaign. Now this would have been in May of 2016. Which is obviously months before this counterintelligence investigation was opened by the FBI into the Trump campaign.

[snip]

If I were them I would pick up the phone and let us know what this is about, this story that broke in the Washington Post, this morning, just hours ago. They probably ought to tell us whether or not they were involved in that or else they have a major major problem on their hands.

[snip]

We should have been told about this about eight months ago. In compliance with the subpoena that we issued last August.But for sure a couple months ago, when we began to ask, we asked questions about, we had a subpoena, and we wanted to figure out what they were doing before and af, right before and right after the opening of the counterintelligence investigation. So we asked for specific information and documents. As you know, that’s what we’ve been fighting over for the last couple months now. And on Friday night it culminated with us telling them because they have swore up and down that they have given us everything that’s pertinent to our investigation after the investigation was open. And they have claimed that there is nothing else that exists before that date. Now, this Washington Post story, I don’t know that they’re claiming for sure that this was an FBI spy or informant, you know, I have no idea whether it is or not, but it has all the makings of the looks of some type of spy or informant. And that would be a major problem because that is not something that has ever been brought to us, and it would be totally out of bounds.

In an appearance providing extensive details about past classified requests and meetings with DOJ (including the one on Friday), Nunes also accuses Rosenstein of leaking by telling the press that Nunes hasn’t read the documents they’ve been demanding but which DOJ has already turned over.

At midnight, just a week ago, the Department of Justice put out something on Republicans saying that we had not read documents that the Department of Justice had provided for us to read. Now, that is a major leak, of a classified meeting, that also happens to be false because they knew that we ran out of time and didn’t have time to actually read these documents, but they did that to embarrass the Speaker of the House and myself and Chairman Gowdy who were given access to those documents but not given time to read those documents. That came from the top of the Department of Justice. Why are those people still working at the Department of Justice. They are leaking.

[snip]

Here’s the bottom line. Mr. Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, and Director Wray have to decide whether or not they want to be part of the cleanup crew or they want to be part of the cover-up crew.

Then Nunes ends by saying he will move towards impeaching Rosenstein and Wray this week, based off a claim that the FBI is withholding details about that contact with “Greenberg,” the one both Stone and Caputo lied to his own committee to cover up.

Nunes: There”s going to be hell to pay by Wednesday morning.

[snip]

This is going to go from myself and just a few committee chairmen to all the members of the House of Representatives who are going to begin to take action against the Department of Justice and FBI.

Bartiromo: Taking action meaning contempt of Congress?

Nunes: Well that’s just one of the options. That’s just one of many options. But I can tell you that it’s not gonna be pretty.

Bartiromo: Are you going to force the resignation of Rod Rosenstein?

Nunes: We can’t force the resignation, but we can hold in contempt, we can pass sense of Congress resolutions, we can impeach, and look, I think we’re getting close to there.

So let’s unpack what’s going on here, aside from a really well orchestrated campaign that has been in the works since January.

First, note how Nunes twists the meaning of counterintelligence here? When discussing why the FBI obtained a FISA order on Carter Page, whom FBI suspected was a willing Russian asset going back to 2013 and whom FBI had questioned the same month Trump added him to the campaign, as part of those ongoing concerns, Nunes suggests FISA orders are only used on terrorists and international bad guys, not people who’ve been suspected of being Russian assets for years. But later in the appearance, he treats the formal start of the counterintelligence investigation into Russians infiltrating Trump’s campaign — the counterintelligence investigation (he is now using counterintelligence in its traditional sense) — as if any investigation of Page or Manafort on their own right before that would be corrupt.

Then Nunes moves to suggest that a Russian contact that Mueller may have only discovered after he obtained a warrant for Stone’s phone on March 9 — a contact that both Caputo and Stone lied to the committee about — is something the FBI has been hiding, not Caputo and Stone.

In an appearance providing a slew of non-public information about a long series of contacts, Nunes accuses Rosenstein for once doing the same thing, with the important difference that Rosenstein was correcting the false claims that Nunes was presenting to the press.

And out of all that — out of Nunes’ willingness to blame the FBI for Stone and Caputo’s lies to his own committee — Nunes is going to bring an impeachment case against Rosenstein and Wray.

Obviously, there’s an easy way for Rosenstein and Wray to defuse this, in more of the bend don’t break approach they’ve been using with these extortionists. They could explain what I have surmised: that the materials about the contact with “Greenberg” that Stone and Caputo lied to him about actually came pursuant to a grand jury search warrant based on information Rick Gates provided in February and March. This is probably a grand jury search warrant (or one similar) that Paul Manafort already tried to, but failed, to get unsealed. As far as we know, Rosenstein and Wray haven’t provided any grand jury material to HPSCI.

Of course, providing the background to this question would require providing more details about what Mueller does and doesn’t know about Roger Stone’s efforts to conspire with Russians during the election.

That’s the hostage situation that Nunes is creating here: Impeachment or details about what Mueller knows of Roger Stone’s conspiracy with Russians to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton.

image_print
32 replies
  1. Trip says:

    Everyone is saying™ that Stone, Nunes and Caputo put a hit on Smith to keep him quiet. Everybody agrees™. Everyone thinks so™, but I would never say it… just about everybody agrees with that, except very stupid people™.

    • emptywheel says:

      Even assuming the last two months have netted adequate evidence to indict the President’s lifelong political advisor, there may be very good strategic reasons to hold off — both not wanting to tip your hand to any Russian actors involved, and/or a desire to indict Stone with others involved in the conspiracy.

      • pseudonymous in nc says:

        Stone has been predicting an indictment — on the cable networks where he supposedly was banned for being himself — for at least a month. Every Friday that passes without one seems to make him a little more cocky. It may work in terms of perpetuating the sideshow and creating pressure on Rosenstein and Wray, but it may also serve as a tell.

  2. cue says:

    “In a written response to the committee, Mr. Caputo, who said he plans to comply with its request, said, “At no time during this period did I have any contact with Russian government officials or employees.” He said he did not discuss Russia with anyone else on the campaign, including Mr. Trump, during his employment from November 2015 to June 2016.

    “The only time the president and I talked about Russia was in 2013, when he simply asked me in passing what it was like to live there in the context of a dinner conversation,” he wrote.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/us/politics/michael-caputo-house-committee-russia-trump.html

    There are a number of follow up questions which come to mind.

  3. Bob Conyers says:

    “we ran out of time and didn’t have time to actually read these documents” — that’s astonishing. Just astonishing.

    Nobody in the press will bother to follow up on that.

    • SteveB says:

      When it comes to reading Devin Nunes has ‘run out of time(tm) ‘ with remarkable regularity.

       

      • Bob Conyers says:

        A guy looking for any reason to attack the investigation only brings this up now? Something tells me that his dog didn’t eat his homework, and what’s more he doesn’t even have a dog.

        • SteveB says:

          The nyt magazine profile on Nunes is instructive (2018/04/24) ” How Devin Nunes turned the House Intelligence Committee inside out”

          It notes how he was the “least read” member according logs of the IC sensitive compartmentalised information facility, did not turn up for briefings from agencies, was unprepared in committee and got his information from crazies.

    • Frank Probst says:

      Note that that statement came immediately after Nunes claimed that the “leak” saying that he hadn’t read the documents was false.  Try diagraming the logic on that.

      • SpaceLifeForm says:

        It was *NOT* a leak. They *KNOW* he did not read, because he did not go to SCIF to read.

  4. Kathleen says:

    “that the materials about the contact with “Greenberg” that Stone and Caputo lied to him about actually came pursuant to a search warrant based on information Rick Gates provided in February and March.”
    I’m sure this is implied in the analysis, but just for the sake of being explicit & clear, I find it really unlikely that, if this is indeed the case, that the search warrant came about because Gates told Mueller of nothing-burger meetings between Greenberg and Stone which Stone seemed to dismiss at the time. So presumably Gates said something much more important about Roger Stone/possibly Caputo.
    I really hope Mueller removes most of whatever menace resides in Nunes play by indicting Roger Stone…in five minutes.

    • emptywheel says:

      Yes. Assuming Mueller got Stone’s phone, then he showed probable cause there was criminal evidence on it.

      • bmaz says:

        Funny how that PC thing works with federal judges.

        Assuming they, too, are not in on the grand conspiracy of the Trump/Giuliani/Nunes fever dream theory.

  5. SpaceLifeForm says:

    Nunes, go to the SCIF, and read the docs.

    Quit your BS bitching about not having time.

    You fucking rat-fucker, you damn well know the SCIF.

     

  6. Michael says:

    “whose receipt of leaks from the NY FBI field office received no attention in the IG Report”- I think that will be in the separate report that discusses leaks to journalists.

    • SpaceLifeForm says:

      The earliest you will hear about that is long away. 2019 maybe, but doubt that soon.

  7. NetZed says:

    Call me crazy, but I believe impeaching Wray in particular would prove to be very embarrassing for Nunes et al, especially if this is something they pursue in the runup to the midterm elections (i.e., after labor day).  If I were Wray/Rosenstein, I’d string these guys along until August and then provoke a confrontation that forces the Trump gang to commit to and expose their anti-democratic conspiracy (a word I use sparingly and only when it accurately denotes a real condition) at the worst possible moment.

    • SpaceLifeForm says:

      May be a bit too late on calendar. Bad media can spin enough in two months to confuse voters.

      Think we need something to happen in July. Preferably before the 24th.

    • Frank Probst says:

      I’m having trouble seeing that happening, too.  It’s one thing to keep bashing Comey and McCabe.  It’s quite another to threaten Trump’s own appointee to lead the FBI with impeachment or contempt of Congress.  This is just Nunes bloviating on Fox News.  But I don’t think Wray has ever been in the cross-hairs like this.  I’m curious as to how he’s going to respond to it.

      • SpaceLifeForm says:

        Do not believe he will respond at all.

        Will ignore.

        Nunes, Rudy, and others are trying to figure out what is really going on. They do not know. But they are being pressured to find out by puppet-masters.

  8. Frank Probst says:

    I’m not sure you can call it a “well orchestrated campaign” if Devin Nunes is the face of it.  He sounds like he’s talking about something completely different than he’s has been, and he’s not really getting his talking points out.

    What I find most interesting in all of this is that Wray has already become full-fledged bad guy in Nunes’ version of reality.  This is all about Rosenstein and Wray.  The two men are now on equal footing.

    • Rusharuse says:

      Nunez wants the part of Bormann in the new Reich. Public auditions for other major roles are ongoing.

      God\Mueller save America.

  9. person1597 says:

    Noonces, the poodle who can chase a car (just not very well) argues that effective states need a truly sovereign leader who is not shackled by constitutions, laws and treaties.

    You know…a player!

    Donald Trump posed this week for publicity photos as he opened his Trump Taj Mahal hotel and casino in Atlantic City. On his love life front, it was reported that he’s no longer seeing Marla Maples. He is now dating someone named “Jeannie”…

    What a proud poodle! His master is Master!

    The fact that a democratic constitution cannot endow a particular person with permanent sovereign authority does not entail that the possibility of a genuine sovereign decision on the exception has disappeared. It merely implies that a decision on the exception in the democratic state must take the form of an exercise of the people’s constituent power.

    Poodle-Royale bitches!

    LOOK OUT! IT’S NOONCES!

  10. eh says:

    Am I the only one parsing “Henry Greenberg” as a baseball reference to Hank “The Hammerin’ Hebrew” Greenberg? Was someone thinking there were home runs in this situation?

    • tudsy says:

      I was definitely thinking of the baseball reference. Though it could just be because when I was 12 and had a pic of me (little Jewish kid) playing ball in the local paper, they somehow captioned me as Hank Greenberg.

Comments are closed.