Devin Nunes predicts criminal referral delivery next week – Washington Examiner

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., predicted Tuesday he will likely make criminal referrals as part of an investigation into alleged political bias in the FBI and the Justice Department by the end of next week.

During an interview on Fox News, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee said he is targeting “people who lied to Congress, perjury, criminal conspiracy.”

Noting that “will be hopefully by the end of next week,” Nunes said his team will work to “make as much public as possible.”

His most narrow prediction yet for his criminal referral delivery comes days after special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his nearly two-yearlong Russia investigation and sent his final report to the Justice Department.

Attorney General William Barr shared a summary of Mueller’s report to Congress on Sunday that said Mueller’s team found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller also declined to determine whether Trump obstructed justice, and Barr said he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded there was insufficient evidence to show the president committed a crime.

Previously, Nunes had said he wanted to see what was in Mueller’s report before taking criminal referral action. Although Congress has not seen the full report, and Democrats are demanding its release within a week, a Justice Department official told Reuters Barr plans to make public a version of it within “weeks, not months.”

Nunes has not named anyone who could appear in a referral, but he has railed against what he says is collusion between the Democrats and the Russians, pointing to use of the unverified Trump dossier by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on onetime Trump campaign official Carter Page as proof of an unraveling operation to undermine the president. That dossier, compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, was funded in part by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

“What needs to happen is we need to have full transparency in this matter. Full transparency,” Nunes said Tuesday. “There was a lot of — the FBI and DOJ have claimed falsely that this investigation started in July 2016. That was a lie.”

“We need to know all the informants and everybody they were running into the Trump campaign because what happened here is wrong,” he added. “The FBI, the Department of Justice should not be able to use counterintelligence capabilities that are used to target terrorists and other bad guys around the globe against political parties. Republicans and Democrats should agree political opposition research from one candidate should not be used to let the nation’s top spy capabilities be used against political parties.”

Nunes has looked to Barr, who on Feb. 14 became attorney general, to make headway towards completing an investigation begun last year by a joint GOP-led task force comprising the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight Committee. Key to this effort, which has been bolstered by intelligence panel Republicans, is investigators looking over roughly 15 transcripts of interviews conducted by the task force last year.