House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-CA) on Wednesday told Fox News' Martha MacCallum he believes the whistleblower complaint filed against President Donald Trump for a call made with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky "reads like the Steele dossier."
"We learned about this three weeks ago on a late Friday night press release that was multiple pages long, about a paragraph long," Nunes said about the whistleblower complaint.
Nunes comments come after it was learned that Schiff knew about the whistleblower's complaint a month before it was brought to the Intelligence Committee.
"We got that, Republicans receive that, what on Earth is going on here. All of you in the press office, why is this being pumped up as big," he said. "A few days later after a briefing, Schiff briefs us a little bit on this and claims he doesn’t know exactly what this is, but it must be really important."
"Those are just two sets of facts that clearly he’s trying to pump up and promote this story. And that we find out that, yeah, because his staff knew about it ahead of time," he said. "The thing not clear is when did they actually find out about it. We still don’t have a date, when did the whistleblower start talking to the Democrats of the Intelligence Committee? It would’ve been very easy to just tell us. He had multiple opportunities to tell."
According to Nunes, there are similarities between how the dossier was written and how the whistleblower complaint was written.
"From reading the complaint, this person is a supposing intelligence officer. Intelligence officers are trained to not have only first-hand sources, but multiple first-hand sources that can corroborate the evidence. So this intelligence person knows this. That’s not what is in the complaint," Nunes said. "It’s all hearsay. There’s no first-hand evidence. To me, this is somebody — I don’t even believe this whistleblower wrote this complaint because it’s written in a way that reads exactly like the Steele dossier, which, for your viewers, I think they know, the Steele was a Clinton bought and paid for."
"The president says today Adam Schiff had a hand in writing that actual complaint. But is there any evidence to back that up?" MacCallum asked.
"No, but it looks like from at least the stories that were written earlier about this, okay, that are from known Russia hoax writers, journalists, then retweeted out by Democrats on the committee, that we learn the Democrats on the committee knew about it, so it has all the markings of the Russia hoax," Nunes explained. "Certainly, don’t forget, the whole explanation how the regulations got changed a week before the whistleblower came in and actually didn’t get changed online until they were asked by the press, I think the IC IG — I suspect that he had to know something too."
The dossier, which was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign, was unverified and used to obtain a FISA warrant. The dossier ultimately lead to spying on Donald Trump's campaign for alleged collusion with Russia. Special Counsel Robert Mueller ultimately declared a collusion did not take place.