Devin Nunes: 'Comey Is In A Lot Of Trouble'

Former FBI Director James Comey chose to mark the second anniversary of his firing by speaking at a CNN town hall event. What stood out most to me about Comey’s performance on Thursday night was his remarkable state of denial. The blogosphere has been abuzz with stories about the many surreal comments he made to CNN host Anderson Cooper. At times, it seemed that not even Cooper believed what Comey was saying. (I posted here on his hypocritical remarks about Rod Rosenstein.)

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), currently the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee (he served as Chairman throughout 2017 and 2018), has played a major role in exposing the coup against President Trump. Nunes appeared on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning and was asked to weigh in on Comey’s performance. He said:

This is a guy who continues to just make a mockery of the entire FBI and the Department of Justice. This is the guy who, remember, leaked his memos in order to make sure that a Special Counsel was created to investigate the president. This is the guy who put an unverified dossier in front of a FISA court. There are lots of problems with Comey’s story. None of it matches up with reality.

In addition to Attorney General William Barr’s probes of the FBI’s activity throughout the 2016 election year and beyond, the DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, is expected to complete an exhaustive investigation in the next month. This began in March 2018. His work has focused on the FBI’s use of the bogus Steele Dossier as the basis of a FISA Court application for a warrant to spy on Carter Page, then a junior advisor to the Trump campaign. The FBI sought and obtained three renewals of the warrant.

Their ability to surveil Page’s communications provided the FBI significant information about other members of the campaign. Asked by Anderson Cooper if he considered these tactics reasonable, Comey said:

The FBI in my view took very reasonable steps, careful steps to try and understand is that true. I can’t believe Republicans would have wanted it any other way and we acted in a very responsible, limited and constrained way. I’m proud of the way we conducted ourselves.

Nunes said, “There’s no question as it relates to the FISA on Carter Page that nothing was done by the book. In fact, it was all done – it was all very irregular.”

Comey then said he feels “confident” the IG Report will not reveal any “misconduct” by the FBI.

Nunes disagreed saying, “I don’t think he’s telling the truth, is the bottom line here. The former FBI director is not a stupid man and he’s acting awfully stupid…Remember when he came before our task force at the end of the last Congress, this is a man who couldn’t answer a question. I think, you know, over 100 times said things like, ‘I don’t recall’ so whenever put under oath on a body like the legislative body of Congress, the guy couldn’t answer a question. He could do a town hall and make a lot of things up but look, I think Mr. Comey is in a lot of trouble and he should be. He made a mess of the FBI.”

Here is a brief list of Comey’s wrongdoing:

We have to remember that James Comey scuttled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. Any mere mortal would have been indicted and convicted under the espionage act for the same offense.
He approved the use of FBI informants to spy on the Trump campaign.
He signed off on a FISA application in October 2016, in which he presented the Steele dossier as a serious document. He failed to mention that it was opposition research commissioned and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.
Then, three months later, when he briefed President-elect Trump about the dossier, he portrayed it as an “unverified and salacious” document.
After he was fired, he gave notes of his meetings with the President, several of which contained classified information, to his friend to leak to the media because he wanted to trigger a special counsel investigation.
In addition, a large number of top-level FBI officials who were involved in the counterintelligence investigation of candidate Donald Trump have either been demoted or fired.