Former Obama Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes has taken President Trump and Republicans to task for trying to undermine the intelligence community by releasing a memo on FBI surveillance abuses.
After the Trump-Ryan-Nunes attack on the nation's leading law enforcement agency, the Republican Party should never be allowed to cast itself as the party of law and order again.
— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) February 4, 2018
That's rich, according to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who authored the FISA memo that details FBI abuses during the 2016 election. In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt Wednesday, Nunes said Rhodes must have been well aware of the unsubstantiated dossier that tried to link the Trump campaign to Russia. Members of the Hillary Clinton campaign reportedly fed the dossier to the FBI, who then used it to get a FISA warrant and spy on the Trump campaign.
"You'd have to be a fool to believe" Rhodes did not have the dossier, Nunes said.
"Well, look, this is now, now what we, look, you’d have to be a fool to think that he did not, right, because this was, this was, Hillary Clinton paid for this information, right? That’s one of the, that was the big breaking point in this. So I knew back in March the FBI had used the dossier. I had assumed that some Democratic superPAC, somebody had paid for the dossier to be developed. I didn’t actually realize it was the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Then as you see all the places where this dossier was ran into, plus all the media had it, how is it possible that Ben Rhodes, who dealt with the media every day, didn’t know about it? I’m sure he knew about it."
Nunes said their memo on the FBI was just Phase One of their investigation. Phase Two is the State Department. The chairman told Hewitt that Secretary of State John Kerry and others in the agency were briefed on the dossier at the very least.
While the FBI warned about the release of the memo last week, citing their "grave concerns" about the document's "omission of facts," Nunes said not a single field agent has called him to complain about the investigation.
"In fact, we’ve had, we’ve had agents from all over the country, spouses, retired agents, current agents, call and say thank you for what you’re doing," he said. "So I don’t think that there is any, the line guys from the FBI, and women, they really support this, from what I can tell."