Capitol Hill is bracing for a collusion bombshell after Fox News host Sean Hannity said his sources tell him “extraordinarily damning” evidence of alleged corruption within the FBI, the Justice Department, and senior members of the Democrat Party, may soon be released.
Hannity predicted that Congress will be issuing “criminal referrals” targeting federal officials.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide
During interviews with Rep. Mark Meadows (R-OH) and Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz on Monday, Hannity predicted the declassification of “buckets” of incriminating information linked to the origins of the Russia investigation. He was very specific:
There are going to be criminal referrals issued this week by [former House Intelligence Committee] Chairman [Devin] Nunes. There are going to be — the president, I interviewed last week — there will be the FISA applications released. There will be [FBI] 302s released, [and] there will be Gang of Eight material. We’ve identified five buckets of information that will be extraordinarily damning. I know that to be the case, based on all of my sources.
President Trump announced last Wednesday that he plans to release the full, unredacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) warrant applications that were used to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. According to conservatives, those warrants were obtained through the introduction of an unverified dossier collected by Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign to discredit Trump ahead of the 2016 election.
Ready to move
Nunes followed Trump’s announcement by revealing that his team was “prepared now” to move forward with at least one criminal referral. “My major concern now is that the FBI and DOJ falsely claimed that this investigation didn’t begin until late July. We now know for certain that that’s not true, we’re still trying to get to the bottom of that,” Nunes said, adding that “there are still documents that need to come out.”
The “Gang of Eight” that Hannity cited refers to the top two Republican and Democrat members from the House and Senate. Republicans believe that documents handed over to the Gang included “exculpatory evidence” related to former Trump aide Carter Page — evidence that was suppressed by the DOJ in its FISC applications.
The “302s” which Hannity mentioned are FBI jargon for contemporaneous notes that field agents collect documenting their official interviews and investigations. Republicans allege that these documents will show agents tied to the discredited dossier continued to influence the Russia investigation after the special counsel was installed.
Last month, Meadows told reporters that the upcoming document dump will show U.S. ambassadors conspired with the FBI and the DOJ to harm Trump. He promised accountability for government officials who violate Americans’ civil liberties.
“They’re not going to like that, Sean. But I think you have the professor on tonight,” he said. “It’s all about civil liberties and making sure those civil liberties are protected. If we cannot count on our government to protect those precious rights to privacy without warrants and warrantless searches, then we’ve got a real problem.”
Meadows continued: “Some of those criminal referrals are justified. Certainly, some of the declassification that gets to the bottom of this is justified. At the same time, we have to protect our national security interests. “
Heads will roll
Nunes hasn’t specifically named anyone who will appear on the committee’s referral, although he pledged to “grab everybody that we need to grab to make sure that there’s a proper investigation done.”
Although only one individual has been targeted so far, Nunes predicted there may be more to “to supplement” the first. He hinted at the nature of the Democrats’ misconduct during a Fox Business interview, arguing that the perpetrators used “counterintelligence capabilities — these secret capabilities that are really only supposed to be used to go after terrorists and other bad guys” to target “a political campaign.”
“They opened up a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign because they could use these secret capabilities” without any oversight from Congress or other federal agencies.
Led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the Senate Judiciary Committee is also preparing an investigation of its own. Senate Republicans will seek to determine if senior administration officials from the Obama White House sought to sabotage the Trump campaign and transition team. Referencing James Comey, America’s former top federal law enforcement official, Graham promised that he “will answer for [his] time as FBI director.”
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