by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, July 2019
Such a revealing interview with the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee; as Chair while Republicans were in the majority, the California Republican Congressman exposed much of what we now know about the Deep State attempted coup:
RUSH: Devin, I really appreciate your making time here. I actually think you are heroic in all this. Without you, we wouldn't know the details that just come off our tongues. We wouldn't know about the Papadopoulos setup if it hadn't been for you. We wouldn't know about the fake beginning of this whole investigation, or so much of what you uncovered just through sheer perseverance. When you look back, what is the thing you were able to find out that unlocked the rest for you?
NUNES: Well, when we blew up Fusion GPS, that was the big thing, right? When we knew that it was the Hillary campaign and the DNC that funded them, that was the beginning of the end for them. Because then the FISA falls apart, and everything else falls apart. Of course, even when we knew the Democrats paid for it, we didn't know the extent of the corruption. We probably had a pretty good idea by the beginning of last year, when I put the memo out about the FISA abuse. And then once the text messages came out, you see the level of corruption here is just unprecedented.
RUSH: You mention Hillary and Fusion GPS. I've been looking at Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, and all these guys. All of this originates not with the FBI, they didn't produce any intel, MI5, MI6 did not produce any intel for this. There wasn't any. There never has been any evidence. All of this, and everybody involved, can be tied back to Hillary Clinton. Alexander Downer, big donor to Clinton Foundation. Andrew Weissmann on Mueller's team is a Clinton donor, was at her election party the night she lost. This whole thing was a political operation. It's never been counter-intel, it's never been criminal, it was never even really an investigation. They were trying to make a case out of things for which there was never any evidence. Everybody says "Obama DOJ", but this all, Congressman, traces right back to her and her campaign people associated with it. Every bit of it does.
NUNES: Right. The only question we have outstanding at this point is, when did the FBI track and the Fusion GPS track, the Hillary campaign track, when did they merge? That's what we don't know.
RUSH: What do you mean, "when did they merge?" I thought it was Hillary who hired Fusion.
NUNES: Right. But at some point, they got the FBI involved.
RUSH: Oh, I see.
NUNES: And that we don't know. We just don't know that date.
RUSH: So you're talking about the actual investigation origin?
NUNES: Yes, at some point they become one and the same, right? But we don't know exactly, where did the get [Peter] Strzok, and [Lisa] Page, and McCabe, and all these guys, to come in? They claim it was July 30. Well, that's a total lie.
RUSH: Can't be then.
NUNES: Right. It's definitely before that. And when you start looking at Downer and all these guys, was the FBI working hand-in-glove with them? Was it Downer and company feeding to the FBI, or was it done jointly? Those are really the important questions that are outstanding at this point.
RUSH: Wasn't the beginning of this, actually the purpose of this, originally to exonerate her? She's the Democrat nominee, they have to exonerate her from this email stuff and the server, they have to get her "not guilty", they have to have her actually proclaimed, as in Comey's July 5 press conference, not prosecutable: she doesn't have any "intent". They had to exonerate her. That seems to be the first thing. But their looking into Trump even precedes that. Do you have any ideas?
NUNES: Oh, yes. We strongly believe that bad things started happening in 2015 to Trump and the Trump campaign. We don't know exactly for sure and we don't know exactly when, but there are an awful lot of strange things that happened to General Flynn, for example, in late 2015. Strange things are happening at Trump Tower in late 2015.
Then we know Fusion GPS comes onstage at some point, along with the corrupt cops at the FBI. When they see in The Washington Post Trump names his advisors, that's when they really went to work. Because that's where you see Papadopoulos' name first, Carter Page's name first, and then all the people who begin to appear in the dossier. Somebody is dirtying them up, and at the same time feeding that stuff to the dirty cops.
Now it could have been just one dirty cop, it could have been two. For all we know it could have been all of them involved in it. But at some point, this becomes a conspiracy, okay? They conspired to do a lot of bad things: to abuse their power, to defraud the United States, to deceive a FISA court, and on and on. But my guess is it's going full bore by April 2016. And by June you've got Carter Page getting invitations to Moscow, you've got Michael Cohen getting invitations to Moscow, or St. Petersburg, I believe. You've got all the weird stuff that happens with Alexander Downer.
RUSH: And Papadopoulos.
NUNES: Right. Downer is kind of connected to everybody. He has this meeting with Papadopoulos, which makes no sense. He meets with Carter Page. That makes no sense. He's friends with all of these guys at Cambridge who are involved in the Papadopoulos stuff. So he for sure plays a part in this. What we don't know is, was he working for Fusion GPS, or was Fusion GPS paying some Cambridge- or London-based political oppo firm to do something? That's pretty much where we are in the investigation right now.
Without the subpoena power [of the House majority], I can't rely on [Democrat Chairman] Adam Schiff to subpoena these people and bring them in for more questioning. So what we're really down to now is making criminal referrals, continuing to get documentation from the DOJ, FBI. Every day we actually get more in.
Surprisingly, more people are talking now. I think maybe that's because of the appointment of a U.S. Attorney who's actually going to get into the origins of this investigation, the U.S. Attorney out of Connecticut, [John Durham]. Just in the last couple of weeks since that's happened, we've had a lot of new information come in that I can't get into right now, but that I think ultimately could lead to more criminal referrals. We have eight criminal referrals so far. We're going to have I think a few more.
On top of that, we're going to have questions that we submit to the Department of Justice, "Look, if you're going to be looking at this, we need answers to all of these questions." That list keeps growing. It's not stopping. There is just so much to be unearthed here, because it looks to be a very sophisticated operation funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democrats, and also working directly with dirty cops at the FBI and DOJ.
RUSH: Yours is a great question: When did the merger happen? I want to take you back to 2015. Trump's not even guaranteed to be the nominee in 2015. People still aren't even taking him seriously. What are these people worried about in 2015 with regard to Donald Trump? Do you have any idea?
NUNES: Yes. You only have to take what some of our favorite people at the DOJ and the FBI and the Obama Administration have said publicly. They all seem to have one clear message, they all refer back to: "Remember back in 2015 when Trump was saying nice things about Putin?" A couple of times at his rallies he said something about Putin. They all seem to be on that message.
First of all, it doesn't make any sense. Whatever Trump was saying in 2015 was no different than what Hillary Clinton had said, what Obama had said. You've talked about it numerous times on your show. It was Obama who promised [outgoing Russian president Dmitry] Medvedev that he had to wait until after the election before he would get "more flexibility". If anything, that should be a counterintelligence investigation.
So with a Republican candidate who nobody thought was going to win, for them to all be on that message, seems to me like you had not only all the Democrats kind of looking at what they could do to Trump, but my guess is at that point you also had many Republicans who were, because at that time there were, what, 15 candidates running. So I think all of that got Comey, who was arguably the most political FBI director since Hoover, do what he does best, and that was to be political.
They all know at that point that Clinton's got these problems with Benghazi and the emails and the missing hard drives. They all know that's sitting out there, and I think they believed it was possible that Hillary's emails could actually show up somewhere. I think that one of Fusion GPS's ulterior motives for running a dirty operation was also to get out there in the public realm, "Oh, these emails, the Russians had them and released them," and then dirty up Trump with it. That became an alternative part of what their operation was about.
RUSH: I guess that's true. It's crazy, though. You've got Obama promising to go easy on Putin after the election, "I'll have more flexibility." That these guys are worried about Trump cozying up to Russia? I don't know. Trump was talking about blowing up NATO. That could bother them. But there's got to be something more to this, because this is the biggest scandal in American history, as you well know, and trying to find out what these people were afraid of is one of the things that fascinates me.
Let's move on to Mueller, because I want your take on [former Attorney General Michael] Mukasey coming out on Fox Sunday and saying the first line in the Mueller report is a lie, claiming the investigation began when the Australian ambassador was told by Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. And the whole thing proceeds from there.
Mueller could have shut this investigation down the first day he took it. When Comey hands him the file, it's empty. There was never any evidence for anything these people were pursuing.
NUNES: Right. Now we have a little more information than we had before. They knew from day one there was no evidence of collusion when Mueller walked in the door. The file cabinet is empty, there's nothing there. Remember, they still haven't shown us the [classified] "scope memo", and they do not want to show us the scope memo. Maybe [Attorney General William] Barr will ultimately show us the scope memo, the directions that Rosenstein gave to Mueller.
First of all, we know it was based on the dossier, okay? That's why they're so damned embarrassed, because who the hell appoints a Special Counsel ten months after you've received this dossier? You have the most powerful law enforcement operation in the world, the FBI, and they know the dossier is false. It doesn't take long for someone to get that and say, "Let's see, was [Michael] Cohen ever in Prague?
I've never been an FBI investigator, but I would hope that our FBI has the ability to quickly check someone who might be colluding with the Vladimir Putin government. It shouldn't take them long to just check a passport to see if he had been there or not, right? You're talking about hours, maybe a day or two, not weeks, and sure as hell not ten months.
So they're dirtying up with the dossier. They know by that time the dossier is garbage, so stupidly, Rosenstein put in that scope memo -- even though I've never seen it -- puts in there all the dossier crap that they're supposed to prove. Rosenstein was essentially conned. When I look back at it, he was conned by Comey and McCabe and all these guys, because he should have never put that dossier in. Because at that time, the dirty cops at the FBI, all the ones who were involved in this investigation, know that dossier is nothing but lies. Lies and innuendo.
So then what else is in the scope memo? Clearly, it had to be "obstruction of justice". That was started by Comey, it's why Comey illegally leaked his notes the to The New York Times. That's what Mueller was really looking at from day one. It wasn't collusion with Russians, because they all knew it was garbage. They were really only looking at obstruction.
I'll go further than that. I believe they thought that if they just baited the President enough, if they kept baiting him and baiting him, that ultimately he would do something that they could get him on obstruction of justice.
RUSH: Exactly. They wanted him to fire someone besides Comey. They wanted him to fire Mueller, or to not let somebody go talk to Mueller. They were baiting him just like that January 6 meeting in Trump Tower. Comey, Clapper, and Brennan are in there and Comey sends those two out and says, "Mr. President, I've got to show you this," and shows him the "golden showers" story.
NUNES: Right. [Laughs]
RUSH: Comey walks out and calls Clapper: "Mission accomplished." Clapper calls CNN, gets it in the news. They knew it was bogus. Everybody involved knew it was bogus. Then they take it to FISA court, despite everybody knowing it was bogus. What about the FISA judges, Congressman? Are they in on this, or were they scammed? Do we know?
NUNES: They were for sure scammed at the beginning. And I'm not saying that the judges are political, but they're all reading what they consider to be the official transcripts of the news, which are all the major newspapers and outlets.
RUSH: New York Times, Washington Post.
NUNES: All the usual suspects. So they continue to approve, they reupped the FISA on Carter Page three times. In 2016, you see The New York Times on October 31 ["Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia"] come out and say, "Oh, they looked at Trump-Russia. There was nothing there. Nobody could find anything." I believe that was somebody at the FBI or DOJ saying, "We really have a mistake here because we got a FISA warrant on Carter Page"
That had been their last-ditch effort to try to find something they could bring out right before the election. They think Page is the weak link, that he has a love affair with the current Russian government, and I think they believed they were going to get some email from Carter Page to somebody at the Trump campaign that was going to be their October surprise. Guess what? They don't get it.
That's the only thing that makes sense as to why they would try to publish a get-out-of-jail-free card and end the investigation right before the election, because they knew they had screwed up.
Then the "unthinkable" happens, Trump wins. That's when they're like, "Oh my God, what are we going to do?" If you remember, right after the election, Obama and [Mark] Zuckerberg from Facebook were blaming "fake news". Then Trump turns that on them within a matter of weeks, and he's calling them "fake news", and it sticks. So that's when they dream up this whole Russia gambit.
I knew this was nonsense from the start. I knew because I had been briefed, first of all. I had been saying they weren't doing enough against Putin for many years before that. I was very critical of them. They wouldn't spend the money that Congress was giving them, okay? Then they have this phony briefing that they give us right before the [2016] election and try to get Mitch McConnell to say something. Luckily, McConnell and Paul Ryan were like, "Wait a second, we're not going to go public and panic the American people." This I don't have any proof for, this is a theory. I think they wanted Republicans to come out in September before the election and justify all the dirty crap they were doing.
So just to continue the timeline: they get nothing on Page, he has zero, he has no contacts with anyone, so they have nothing they can release before the election. Then somebody leaked that October 31 New York Times story that they didn't find anything. And that's the truth, they never found anything on Page.
Then after the election, the Obama team dreams up doing this new "assessment". That's still redacted from the American people, but I can tell you it's garbage. Do Russians do bad things, and did they try to influence our election? Yes, they have for 50 years. But there are still questions that we have about the ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment] that haven't been answered.
So they changed their story right after the election, from: "The Russians didn't do anything," to: "Oh, the Russians definitely wanted to help Trump."
RUSH: They couldn't do that prior to the election because they thought Hillary was going to win. They don't want to taint her victory by saying the Russians had anything to do with it. So that's when they do the 180. Hillary loses, and all of a sudden the reason has to be the Russians wanted Trump to win and arranged it.
NUNES: That's right.
RUSH: Then Obama sends the Russian diplomats home in December after the Michael Flynn story breaks, all of it coordinated and planned, made for consumption by media to be reported with anonymous sources from intelligence officials, former and present, and this onslaught began. And it's still underway, even after the Mueller report.
NUNES: I know.
RUSH: The Democrats are still acting like there's collusion in it, but Mueller supposedly can't say because Barr is somehow covering it up. It's ridiculous.
NUNES: It is ridiculous, but it's not going to end until the U.S. Attorney out of Connecticut [John Durham] gets to the bottom of all this. It's never going to end. They have literally poisoned the minds of millions of Americans with their garbage. I say, "they", it's the Clinton people, it's the Obama people, it's all the Democrats in Congress, it's their entire Party apparatus, including all of their intelligence assets, also known as the "press corps". They are operating as intelligence assets. Remember, Rush, they played that part all through 2016. There's probably a dozen at least, if not two dozen press operatives operating as dirty oppo intelligence outlets where they are placing disinformation in the press, like the [Michael] Isikoff story that they use in the FISA.
So how did I know this was garbage from the beginning? Number one, because Obama never took this seriously, Putin seriously. Number two, they changed their story right after the election. And number three, by the leaks that were coming out. Especially when the leak against General Flynn came out of a phone call between him and the Russian ambassador. Then you knew. At that point I'm like, "Oh, my God, can it get worse than this?" Of course, it just kept getting worse.
RUSH: Now, you were after the declassification of a lot of documents you had seen. You wanted the FBI to declassify. Have any of those been declassified yet, or are some of those documents that Trump ordered Barr to declassify in that same batch?
NUNES: Those are the same ones that the President gave to Barr, and now Barr has full power over those. Obviously I want all of those documents at some point. But if there's going to be a real investigation, we need to let real investigators do real work. There could be some things in those documents that they may want to investigate.
I've been running our own House investigation on this for two and a half years. There would be some things that I would want from those documents that I've seen to ask questions to some of the dirty cops and the Clinton campaign dirty operatives. You might be able to use some of that to try to get to the truth, but if you declassify all of it at once, that could let them build their fake narratives again. So I want it all out, but right now I feel comfortable with where it's at, because there's a real investigation going on and I want Barr to not jeopardize that investigation by declassifying some stuff prematurely.
RUSH: Well, declassification isn't releasing. A lot of people are desperate to see what's in these documents since you've been trying, and Rosenstein and the rest of the guys stonewalled you. People think with declassification comes immediate release, that we get all the answers and could finally punish the people that did this. That's not the way this is going to work.
NUNES: Right.
RUSH: But Congressman, walk me through this. I'm the bad guys, I'm Comey, I'm McCabe, I'm all these people. Why would I memorialize this conspiracy? Why would I commit any of this to paper that could someday be found? Is there actual self-incrimination in these documents?
NUNES: What I can say, that I've said before, is one, there is exculpatory evidence in there.
RUSH: Ah, yes.
NUNES: Exculpatory evidence not submitted in a criminal trial gets everything thrown out, right? The FISA process is a little bit different, but if exculpatory evidence wasn't given to a FISA court, those judges have the right to essentially bar those lawyers from ever practicing again. That would be a significant step.
RUSH: Speaking of that, John Dowd, one of Trump's former lawyers, is ripping Mueller's misrepresentation of his phone call as a supposed instance of obstruction. According to Dowd, Mueller deceptively edited the transcript, deleting Dowd's statement that he was not asking Flynn's lawyer for any confidential material. You've said the "Mueller dossier", you call it that, is all a fraud.
NUNES: Yes.
RUSH: Dowd is saying there's all kinds of exculpatory stuff that Mueller did not include in the report. That's a famous tactic of Andrew Weissmann. He was cited by the Supreme Court for this in the Ted Stevens case and some of the Enron cases.
NUNES: I know that all Republicans were happy, and rightfully so, that Mueller found no evidence of collusion. But from the time that announcement came out, when Barr did his [four-page] memo, I said I wanted everybody to remember that there never was any evidence of collusion. We've never seen a drop of evidence of collusion, so that whole idea that people are celebrating Mueller? We shouldn't do that.
RUSH: I agree a thousand percent.
NUNES: We actually should be holding Mueller accountable. Then when the Mueller dossier came out, it's easy just to pick it apart. One of the things I found myself on day one was that they used an unbelievable number of news stories.
RUSH: That they leaked.
NUNES: [Laughs] In many cases that they had leaked, or they had been a source for leaks. But even more ridiculous than that, they cherrypicked them. So Joseph Mifsud, for example, is an interesting character in all this. You would think if anything, since Mifsud was the guy who supposedly knew about the dirt on Hillary, shoot, 50 pages of the Mueller dossier should be on Mifsud, right? Where did he get this from? How did he know? Who were his contacts?
But we learn nothing about Mifsud. In the Mueller dossier they use a news story to say that he worked at Link Campus in Rome. But in the same news story, if you actually read it, what they don't tell the American people and what doesn't make it into the Mueller dossier, is that Mifsud was considered by the same authors as a "Western intelligence asset".
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: I'm not saying that's exculpatory, but that's just one little thing that I found in the first 30 minutes after the Mueller dossier came out. On Dowd, Rush, that's exactly right. They cherrypicked what Dowd said in order to build their narrative. You see that throughout the entire Mueller dossier. They wrote a whole book on collusion, which is a joke. You get more serious, real stuff from our report, the report that House Republicans did, than you get out of the Mueller dossier, part one. The Mueller dossier part two, obstruction of justice, makes no sense. As he was exiting the stage, Mueller came out in his little performance and says what? "Because of the rules, we can never do anything." Really? Well, you knew that when you walked in. So, the whole thing stinks.
RUSH: If you knew that, why even start this?
NUNES: Yes.
RUSH: What do you think of the latest report out of the UK that Christopher Steele has changed his mind, he's agreed to meet in London with U.S. officials about the dossier in the next few weeks -- but only about his interactions with the FBI, and only with the approval of the British government. What, if anything, is going to come out of this?
NUNES: Just kind of reading the tea leaves there, which is what you have to do. Here's the only value that the intelligence assets known as the press corps have. You have to read their story and then figure out who is behind the leak and planting the story.
We House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee sent a pretty detailed letter to President Trump and said, "Before you go to the UK, there's a whole series of questions that need to be asked of our long-term partners." I have no proof of this, but my guess is that at least behind the scenes, those questions were being asked.
I believe what's happened now is that Steels and his people over in London, whoever he's affiliated with, which I'm guessing are Fusion GPS types of operations, they're trying to get out in front of the story to say what he will and will not do. My guess is that the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, John Durham, has not even reached out to Steele at this point. If I'm the U.S. Attorney, I'm like, "Look, dude, you lied to the FBI, so the best advice to you is, if you don't want to be extradited to the U.S. and put in jail for five years, you better cooperate." Because I know what he was doing with the FBI, but what I don't know is all of his interactions with the Clinton campaign and, for lack of a better definition, all of the Fusion GPS operatives who may or may not be under Fusion GPS or paid by Fusion GPS, but were for sure under that umbrella. That would include Alexander Downer.
RUSH: Yes. Well, like you said at the very beginning, finding out when the Clinton people, the names we mentioned, merged with the FBI to get this operation up and running, and to appear to be an official counterintelligence investigation -- when it was never an investigation because there was never any evidence for anything.
Now, Barr told CBS that he didn't think that the actions of the intelligence community -- he didn't mention names, but we know we're talking Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, and Comey -- he didn't think any of this was "treason" as a legal matter. Are you looking at it as though it could be?
NUNES: We've made criminal referrals. One is that they conspired, a criminal conspiracy, to lie to the FISA court. There was criminal conspiracy involved in all of that, which would expose a lot of people to a conspiracy charge, which I think carries up to like 25 years in prison. A second referral -- these are also hard to prove -- is that they also criminally conspired to manipulate intelligence for their own political purposes.
Between all our attorneys on the House Intelligence Committee, including members of Congress, former U.S. Attorney John Ratcliffe, who has been involved in this process, former Congressman Gowdy, who was also a U.S. Attorney, as we've looked through all of this, we think that those two conspiracy avenues are at this point the best to go down, in terms of holding people accountable. Now, it doesn't mean you couldn't get to treason. But look, if they conspired, if you can prove conspiracy on both of those items, a whole bunch of people are going to jail.
RUSH: I hope. I really do. I think this is the most outrageous political scandal that's happened in my lifetime. It was an attempt to overturn election results. Everything about this still enrages me. Do you think Barr and Durham are going to succeed? Are they going to expose this?
NUNES: I think that it's impossible for them not to charge people. I don't want to get into specific names because we've made many criminal referrals, but you've probably talked about them on your show numerous times. It is impossible not to get people for lying to Congress, obstructing a Congressional investigation, lying to the FBI, and leaking classified information. It's impossible.
RUSH: Why? Hillary got away with it.
NUNES: She did, but that was under a different regime. But those are what I would consider to be easy statutes to prosecute under. So I think at a minimum we get that, but I believe that we will get a full picture of what actually happened.
RUSH: You do? That's good. I'm glad to hear that.
NUNES: Yes. Ultimately to prove conspiracy is very difficult. You really would have to have one or two people turn and say, "Here's what happened," and kind of give up the whole story. If not, you're developing a circumstantial case, and then you have to go to a jury, which is hard to get all jurors to agree.
But there is no question in my mind that Barr is going to produce a real report and get all the information out. So there will be no question who Mifsud was, who Steele was working for, when the FBI started this operation and how many informants they were running into the Trump campaign, and whether these informants were dual-hatted. Were they working for a foreign government? These are all answers that Barr is going to get.
We're going to have finality on the story, that much I believe. Whether or not you can get these guys for conspiracy or treason, everybody is innocent until proven guilty, and ultimately the Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney will have to decide: Do they have enough evidence to get this past a jury?
RUSH: Right. Well, that is legal court. Look at the court of public opinion. These people haven't proved diddly squat on Donald Trump, and yet at one point several months ago, 42 percent of the American people believed the Russians actually tampered with voting machines. After two years of this lying-sack coverage, New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, multiple stories a day, Russia collusion, Trump collusion. They didn't need to go to court to prove it in the eyes of the public. All they had to do was simply pummel people with it every day for two years.
That's why CNN and MSNBC are losing their audiences, right? They had those audiences convinced that Trump is a traitor, convinced that he had colluded, convinced that Russia stole the election. Now there's no evidence for it and these people are vastly let down. That's how easy it is to manipulate people. You've been talking about the media as "intelligence assets". Hell, they're Democrat operatives.
NUNES: Right. [Laughs]
RUSH: Not one of them, not one journalist, saw the real story here and tried to make a name for him- or herself. It's stunning. Not one. Hundreds of journalists, all complicit with the intelligence community, no less.
NUNES: I think stupidly, Rush, though a lot of them will never admit it, a lot of them actually believed it. They all believed they were going to bring these guys down.
RUSH: I totally agree. They believed it, and they wanted it to be true.
NUNES: At some point, though, it became clear they knew it wasn't true. They think they're getting real FBI information and information from our intelligence agencies, so they wanted to believe it and they did. But look, after about a year or so, they knew they didn't have anything. Then it just turned into a coverup. That's why you see them going so hard after this "obstruction" joke, that he somehow obstructed an investigation that was likely illegal in the beginning.
RUSH: It's back to him obstructing something that didn't happen.
NUNES: Right. Thank you.
RUSH: Anyway, I know you're slammed. I really appreciate your time on this.
NUNES: Well, before we go here, you started talking about what got me through all of this. I don't know if you remember, but I called you and thanked you after they came after me on all the ethics garbage, when they made me step aside.
RUSH: Oh, yes.
NUNES: If it wouldn't have been for you and Hannity and a few others, I would have been a dead man walking. I couldn't have survived. So thank you for that, because if it wouldn't have been for the few voices that we have out there, I would have been screwed.
RUSH: Thank you, nut you were heroic. You were doing work that nobody was willing to do. It needed to be supported. I felt that every time I saw you at a joint press, there's "Pencil Neck" Adam Schiff standing next to you and he's got this smarmy, bug-eyed look on his face, he's just dying to take that microphone away from you. These people just irritate me -- knowing that they know what they're doing is bogus.
NUNES: I'm sure you've talked about this on your show, but we know Harry Reid knew about the dossier in August of 2016. We don't know when Nancy Pelosi and all her minions knew about it. Trump doesn't find out about it until he's briefed on it by Comey.
One more thing, think about Comey's latest [Washington] Post op-ed. Read it closely. I think he's trying to separate himself from the rest of the dirty cops -- because he put things in that op-ed that he knows at this point are not true, okay? So the only reason he would be doing that is, he's probably trying to separate himself out from the timeline. They're all sticking to this garbage, "Downer brings this to us and we start this investigation, we're just doing what you expect us to do." But that's not what happened. I think in that op-ed he's trying to get his story straight, and he's going to basically claim, "Hey, I didn't know what these guys were doing. They must have been doing things behind my back."
RUSH: That's right. Barr is even saying the stories aren't jibing that he's hearing now from these people.
NUNES: Right. Comey's trying to get his story in line because look, this whole thing falls apart. Last summer Gowdy and I and our investigators figured out that they were lying to us about Papadopolous and Downer starting this investigation. That is when they officially opened the communication, but they were lying to us about all the other stuff they were doing before that. They've never come clean on that, and that's where a lot of these questions arise, because we can't tell the difference between a Fusion GPS op and a dirty cop op.
RUSH: That's fascinating.
NUNES: Yes. That's what we really want to figure out.
RUSH: Mark my words, this is going to trace back to Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama is not going to be too far removed from it.
NUNES: Not too far removed. They had to have known about it.
RUSH: If he knew about it, he had to be tacitly approving of it.
NUNES: He had to have been briefed. If you notice another telling thing, who is really quiet? Obama. He's not saying anything. Susan Rice wrote that exculpatory email that looks like it's planted hours before she leaves the White House, right? So all these things just don't add up. Then we've got text messages. We know they were going over to brief [Denis] McDonough, the [Obama] Chief of Staff. So it will be interesting to see what Barr can find out here.
RUSH: Well, you sound pretty confident that he's going to get to the bottom of it, and I hope you're right. Believe me, there are millions of Americans who are hoping the same thing, and hoping that the timing is beneficial for 2020. Turn the tables on these people.
NUNES: Yes. If they don't end up in jail, they should pay one hell of a political price, no question about it.
RUSH: It's hard for people to get their arms around these people going to jail, but wait until it's released what they did. Then that may change. Look at the people they put in jail who would have never been investigated were it not for this hoax.
NUNES: The Papadopoulos one is just outrageous. They set that poor guy up. It's awful. That's just flat-out entrapment. There's no other name for it. Then you've got Flynn. Ultimately maybe Flynn is not going to go to jail, but what they've done to him is awful.
RUSH: I know, they've ruined him. They've threatened to ruin his son, break his son. They were telling Papadopoulos' fiancee at the time to leave him, that he was in such big trouble and he was a bad guy. Weissmann is a really, really bad actor. Do you think Mueller was mostly just a figurehead, with all these worker bees actually doing the work and he's like an aged name on the masthead, he's like "of counsel", a rainmaker kind of guy? Or is he actively involved in all this?
NUNES: We start to get little bits and pieces now, we have people talking to us who were interviewed by the Mueller dossier team.
RUSH: [Laughs] The "Mueller dossier team".
NUNES: What I keep finding out is that Mueller is never in any of the meetings. So I don't know what he was doing. But now he's not going to come testify to Congress, or he's going to try not to come testify?
RUSH: He doesn't want to answer your questions, that's why. He's not afraid of what Schiff would ask. He doesn't want to answer anything that you guys would ask him.
NUNES: That's right. He'll get destroyed. Republicans wouldn't even have to bring our C-game.
RUSH: That's funny. We'll keep our eyes on this. I hope you're right about Barr and Durham. Again, thanks for your time and everything else, too.
NUNES: You're welcome. Thanks, Rush. There will be lots of stuff coming out, so whatever you need.
RUSH: Devin, you be good, and we'll chat soon.
NUNES: Okay, my friend.