House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said in an interview that aired on Thursday that the redacted portions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application the FBI used to get a surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page during the 2016 election is just as bad as what has already been released to the public.
“What’s in the redactions is equally bad, some would probably say worse than what the American people can see today,” Nunes told Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton on “Rising” on Wednesday.
“So just to be clear, there’s 400, roughly 75 percent of them are blacked out,” he continued. “So people learned over the weekend that the dossier indeed was what led this FISA, so they used that dossier and pieces of that dossier to push that FISA out to Carter Page.”
“I would argue that what’s left in there is really bad, if not worse, but also what’s not in there is even worse than what people can see, what people can’t see.”
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee led by Nunes in February voted to release a memo alleging the Justice Department abused the FISA warrant process in order to hurt the president’s campaign, saying Page’s surveillance warrant was based on the dossier composed by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
Democrats on the committee and the FBI have pushed back on the claims that the memo says “raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”
However, Justice Department officials later on Wednesday said Nunes still had not reviewed the mostly unredacted application, but that about 30 lawmakers from the House and Senate have viewed the classified documents.
Nunes’ office told Sexton they did not have any comment on the matter.
— Julia Manchester
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