House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes says it is “time to eliminate redactions,” less than a day after the Justice Department released top-secret documents related to the surveillance warrants used to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The bold statement was made Sunday in conjunction with jabs at the media and Democrats for going on “wild rants,” as Nunes shared an opinion piece written by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, making the case that those highly redacted 400-plus pages on the 2016 application for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant taken out on Page, in addition to three renewal applications, shows that the House Intelligence Committee memo on alleged FISA abuse released earlier this year was “overwhelmingly accurate.”
Nunes has expressed frustration with redactions in the past. The report the House Intelligence Committee released earlier this year on Russian interference in the 2016 election contained “page after page” of redactions,” Nunes lamented last week on Fox News. Without those blackouts, made at the behest of the U.S. intelligence community, Nunes claimed special counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 12 Russian officials on charges of hacking Democrats’ computers during the 2016 campaign would look “ridiculous” because it left out Republicans who were also targeted.
He also stressed that Trump “has got to” declassify the report.
On Saturday, Trump lashed out at the use of redactions, focusing his ire at the FISA documents about Page. Trump said in a pair of tweets that the documents were “ridiculously redacted,” but argued they did show “little doubt” that the Justice Department and FBI “misled” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and bolstered his “witch hunt” accusations about the Mueller probe.
He also called on Republicans to “get tough now,” as some of his Republican allies in Congress called for more of the documents to be unredacted. Rep. Mark Meadows, head of the House Freedom Caucus, suggested there was a “potentially groundbreaking development” being missed in the public eye. “The Carter Page FISA docs should be declassified and further unredacted (protecting only sources and methods) so Americans can know the truth,” the North Carolina Republican tweeted. “If the previous admin was funneling campaign research toward surveillance, we need to know.”
Meanwhile, Democrats argued the documents showed federal officials took appropriate measures to investigate a suspicious target.
“These documents affirm that our nation faced a profound counterintelligence threat prior to the 2016 election, and the Department of Justice and FBI took appropriate steps to investigate whether any U.S. persons were acting as an agent of a foreign power,” House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a statement. “FBI and DOJ would have been negligent had they not used all the tools at their disposal, including Court-authorized FISA surveillance, to protect the country.”
While the GOP memo was released without redactions, a Democratic rebuttal memo was made public shortly thereafter, but with redactions.
Nunes’ Democratic challenger in the 22nd Congressional District of California this November, Andrew Janz, seized upon Schiff’s criticism that the warrant documents show that the “Nunes memo” on alleged FISA abuse, released in February, “misrepresented and distorted these applications.”
“We all know that [Nunes] is a liar but it has now come to our attention he specifically lied about the FISA warrant & the FBI. Going as far to lie about the men & women tasked with keeping us safe. Nunes must be removed from HPSCI effective immediately,” Janz tweeted.
On the media front, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump made the opposite argument York did with an opinion piece titled, “With the release of new documents, Devin Nunes’s memo on Carter Page has gotten even less credible.”
