Yeah, let’s see exactly what they were saying. Based off a drunken comment about something everyone was speculating about Hillary, passed to the FBI by a Clinton pal. If that’s it, then this was incredibly dumb from the beginning.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding an uncensored copy of the document the bureau used to formally begin its investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign.
The originating document has been the subject of much controversy. After some Republicans alleged that the FBI used never-verified parts of the Trump dossier as part of its reason to begin the investigation in July 2016, some “current and former” officials leaked to the New York Times that no, it was the case of George Papadopoulos, reported to U.S. authorities by foreign intelligence agents, that prompted the FBI investigation.
“The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?” the Times reported on Dec. 30. “It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.”
The Times report led to a lot of arguing back and forth over what “started” the investigation. It wasn’t a particularly enlightening argument, because whatever the FBI cited to formally begin the investigation, it is beyond debate that in the summer of 2016, the bureau knew not just about Papadopoulos, but also about a) Carter Page’s trip to Moscow, b) the dossier, and c) the DNC hack, among other things. They would all play big roles in the investigation.
Nevertheless, Nunes has wanted to see the originating document, referred to as an Electronic Communication, or EC. In the new letter to Rosenstein and Wray, Nunes outlines the steps he has taken to see it, so far without success.