Devin Nunes 'prepared now' to deliver criminal referral after Trump vows to release FISA documents

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said Thursday his team is "prepared now" to submit a criminal referral to the Justice Department focusing on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee has been teasing a referral for months, and earlier this week he predicted its delivery by the end of next week. During an interview on Fox Business, Nunes said there will be one referral to start, and possibly more to follow, after President Trump said Wednesday he plans to release the unredacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants that jump-started the Russia probe.

"My major concern now is that the FBI and DOJ falsely claimed that this investigation didn’t begin until late July," Nunes told anchor Maria Bartiromo. "We now know for certain that that’s not true, we’re still trying to get to the bottom of that. Of course there are still documents that need to come out, but we are prepared and are now drafting a criminal referral … we wanted to wait until the Mueller report came out so that we could just — if there was anything in there that might be of interest, but I think we’re prepared now to at least submit our first criminal referral." He said he thinks this referral would "grab everybody that we need to grab to make sure that there’s a proper investigation done," but noted there may be more to "to supplement" the first.

Nunes has not named anyone who could appear in a referral, but he has railed against what he says is collusion between the Democrats and the Russians, pointing to use of the unverified Trump dossier by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants to spy on onetime Trump campaign official Carter Page as proof of an unraveling operation to undermine the president. That dossier, compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, was funded in part by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Testimony from DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who served as an unofficial backchannel between Steele and the FBI, which was made public this year confirmed that top Justice Department officials knew about the dossier earlier than first thought, and that among those who knew was Andrew Weissmann, who went on to become the top deputy of special counsel Robert Mueller. “Some of the biggest challenges that we had is because they used our counterintelligence capabilities — these secret capabilities that are really only supposed to be used to go after terrorists and other bad guys, they actually turned it on a political campaign, and that’s where they first went wrong," Nunes told Bartiromo, while talking about a "DOJ and FBI run amok.” "Now, my estimation is they used what’s called ‘counterintelligence’ because they could keep it siloed and hidden from the American people and from the rest of FBI and DOJ … they opened up a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign because they could use these secret capabilities," he added. "Then, of course, we all know the story about how they went to the FISA court, they mislead the FISA court, lied to the FISA court in order to get a warrant on a Trump campaign associate so that they then could get a bunch of emails, phone calls, and records into the campaign."

Mueller concluded his nearly two-year-long Russia investigation and sent his final report to the Justice Department. Attorney General William Barr shared a summary of Mueller's report to Congress on Sunday that said Mueller's team found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller also declined to determine whether Trump obstructed justice, and Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded there was insufficient evidence to show the president committed a crime. Nunes had said he wanted to see what was in Mueller's report before taking criminal referral action. Although Congress has not seen the full report, and Democrats are demanding its release within a week, a Justice Department official told Reuters that Barr plans to make public a version of it within "weeks, not months." Nunes has looked to Barr, who on Feb. 14 became attorney general, to make headway toward completing an investigation begun last year by a joint GOP-led task force comprising the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight Committee. Key to this effort, which has been bolstered by intelligence panel Republicans, is investigators looking over roughly 15 transcripts of interviews conducted by the task force last year.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/devin-nunes-prepared-now-to-deliver-criminal-referral-after-trump-vows-to-release-fisa-documents

Trump poised to pick Morgan Ortagus of Fox News as State Department spokeswoman

President Trump is expected to nominate Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus to be the spokeswoman for the State Department. Ortagus, a counterterrorism expert with extensive foreign policy experience, is expected to replace Heather Nauert in the role, according to reports.

The 36-year-old is a U.S. Naval Reserve officer and previously worked in public affairs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. From 2008 to 2010 she served as an intelligence analyst for the Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, according to the biography on her consulting firm’s website. She will replace Nauert, who has served as the State Department’s spokeswoman since 2017. Trump had picked Nauert to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but she withdrew consideration after reports surfaced that she had employed an immigrant nanny that was in the U.S. legally, but not authorized to work. State Department Deputy Spokesman Robert Palladino has been filling in for Nauert during briefings since she announced her withdrawal from consideration for the ambassador role. It is not clear when the White House plans to announce the pick.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-poised-to-pick-morgan-ortagus-of-fox-news-as-state-department-spokeswoman

Nellie Ohr: ‘I Favored Hillary Clinton’

Former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr told Congress in October that she “favored” Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

A transcript of Ohr’s testimony was published Thursday.

Nellie Ohr, whose husband is DOJ official Bruce Ohr, detailed her work for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the Steele dossier.

Nellie Ohr said that a Ukrainian lawmaker was one of Fusion GPS’s sources.

Nellie Ohr, a former Fusion GPS contractor and wife to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told Congress that she “favored” Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, and would not have researched the Democrat as she did Donald Trump. “I would probably have been less comfortable doing opposition research that would have gone against Hillary Clinton,” Nellie Ohr told a congressional task force on Oct. 19, according to a transcript released Thursday. “And why is that?” a congressional staffer asked Nellie Ohr. “Because I favored Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate,” said Nellie Ohr.

She gave research she did on Trump and his associates to her husband, Bruce Ohr, in hopes that he would provide it to the FBI. Bruce Ohr did exactly that. He testified during his own congressional hearing that he provided a flash drive containing his wife’s research to the FBI. What the bureau did with the information remains a mystery, but it is another example of potentially biased information being provided to investigators working on a probe of the Trump campaign. Republican lawmakers interviewed the Ohrs and several Justice Department and FBI officials as part of an investigation into the FBI’s handling of its Trump-Russia probe. Republicans have accused the FBI of misrepresenting the infamous Steele dossier in applications for surveillance warrants against Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser.

The FBI’s warrant applications did not reveal that Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned the dossier, was working against Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC. The applications also did not contain information provided by Bruce Ohr that Steele had said he was “desperate” to see Trump lose the election. Bruce Ohr, who served as deputy assistant attorney general at the time, served as a back channel of sorts between the FBI and Steele, a former MI6 officer. The Ohrs met with Steele on July 30, 2016, to discuss Steele’s investigation of Trump’s possible ties to the Russian government.

As part of their investigation of the FBI, Republican lawmakers have tried to understand the labyrinthian relationship between the Ohrs, Fusion GPS, Steele and the FBI. Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson attempted to push information from the dossier through the FBI, Justice Department, State Department and the media. In her interview, Nellie Ohr discussed the nature of her work for Fusion. She said that she did not recognize any of her work in the Steele dossier.

One of the more startling revelations in Nellie Ohr’s testimony is that a Ukrainian politician was a source for Fusion GPS. As TheDCNF first reported, Nellie Ohr testified that Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist turned lawmaker, provided information to Fusion GPS. Leshchenko revealed in August 2016 a so-called “black ledger” that listed alleged kickback payments from the Ukrainian government to Paul Manafort. The veracity of the ledger has come under scrutiny, and Leshchenko has faced charges in Ukraine for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. There is no indication that Leshchenko’s work ended up in the dossier.

https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/03/28/nellie-ohr-favored-hillary-clinton/