The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee says he is preparing a list of eight names of 'Watergate wannabes' to send to Attorney General William Barr for criminal referral as it relates to the Russia investigation.
‘We couldn't really send these criminal referrals over without an attorney general in place, Devin Nunes, the Congressman from California, told Fox News on Sunday.
‘So we are prepared this week to notify the attorney general that we are prepared to send those referrals over and brief him if he wishes to be briefed.’
‘We think they're pretty clear, but as of right now this is, this may not be all of them, but this cleans up quite a bit.
‘We have eight referrals that we are prepared to send over to the attorney general this week.’
House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes said on Sunday that he plans to make eight criminal referrals to Attorney General William Barr
Nunes said he had prepared the referrals for two years but waited until a permanent attorney general was in place. Barr is seen above at the White House last week
Nunes did not specify the individuals he planned to name, but he said that five of them committed crimes including lying to Congress, misleading Congress, and leaking classified information.
The other three referrals are ‘complicated,’ he said.
Nunes said that the three are being referred for crimes including lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and ‘manipulating intelligence.’
Last year, Nunes and his staff wrote a memo alleging anti-Trump bias within the Justice Department.
Earlier this week, Nunes said he would refer 'two dozen' people to the attorney general.
'There are people who definitely lied and misled Congress,' Nunes told Fox News on Wednesday.
'If they don't go to prison, then we will have a two-tier justice Department in this country and it is not going to be good.'
Nunes didn't tell Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday exactly how many criminal referrals he plans to send to the DOJ, when they would be ready or who would be his targets.
'The American people need to have confidence in the FBI and the Department of Justice. We are working on the referrals,' Nunes said. 'There's going to be many of them.'
'There are going to probably at least be a dozen if not two dozen individuals,' he predicted, 'and as we continue to get more information and build these and build them out, we want to make sure that everything is finished before we turn them in.'
Nunes said Wednesday night that he will sent up to two dozen criminal referrals to the Justice Department in coming days
Democrats at the helm of the Intelligence Committee have directed their firepower at Trump, retracing ground already trod by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
They have shown no indication of focusing on current or former FBI and Justice Department officials tied to the earliest decisions to investigate the president and his 2016 campaign aides.
Nunes, who led the panel until Democrats took over the House in January, proposed a likely dead-end desire in February for subpoenaing a dozen people.
It's a near-certainty that Democratic chair Adam Schiff will ignore him.
Instead Nunes changed tack, running his own parallel investigation with the goal of encouraging the Trump DOJ to take action on a series of recommendations of criminal prosecutions.
A joint task force made up of House Judiciary and Oversight Committee members and the Oversight Committee grilled at least 15 witnesses in 2018.
Some transcripts of those interviews are now in the public domain following their release by Judiciary Committee ranking Republican Doug Collins.
The transcripts released so far reflect the testimony of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie Ohr, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, top FBI counterintelligence official Bill Priestap and Former FBI agent Peter Strzok.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee approved a series of subpoenas on Wednesday and the Ways and means Committee demanded to see the president's last six IRS tax returns.
'There is nothing we can ever give to the Democrats that will make them happy,' Trump tweeted Thursday. 'This is the highest level of Presidential Harassment in the history of our Country!'
President Trump said on Sunday attacked Mueller's team for 'illegally leaking information' to the press and then blasted the media for making up stories, calling them a 'joke.'
'Looks like Bob Mueller's team of 13 Trump Haters & Angry Democrats are illegally leaking information to the press while the Fake News Media make up their own stories with or without sources - sources no longer matter to our corrupt & dishonest Mainstream Media, they are a Joke!,' he tweeted.
The president has been on the attack since The New York Times reported a story on Thursday that suggested Mueller's final report might be more damaging to the president than Barr's four-page synopsis of its conclusions indicated nearly two weeks ago.
But Trump attorney Jay Sekulow gave a simple answer Sunday when asked if there were concerns that the full Mueller report could be more damaging than Barr's summary.
President Donald Trump attacked special counsel Robert Mueller's team for 'illegally leaking information' to the press
Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said there were no concerns the full Mueller report could be more damaging than Attorney General William Barr's summary
'No,' he told ABC's 'This Week.'
But he also said it would be a problem if Mueller's team was leaking to the media.
'If this is true that there are actually members of that team leaking their concerns about the way things have been phrased to the public, I think is problematic,' he noted.
The president frequently attacks news reports he doesn't like as 'fake news.' And he has long blasted Mueller's investigation as a 'witch hunt' and charged that his staff is made up of mostly Democrats.
Mueller is a registered Republican who was appointed by Republican Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein to investigate Russia's actions in the presidential election.
Of his 17 team members, 13 are registered Democrats, according to reports.
Trump went after the Times shortly after it released its bombshell report that there could be more to the Mueller report than Barr's summary indicated.
Barr told Congress that the special counsel found no evidence of collusion between Trump or any of his campaign officials and Russia during the 2016 election.
Mueller also left it up to the attorney general to decide whether Trump should be charged with obstruction of justice.
Barr, working with Rosenstein, decided not to charge the president.
Democrats are demanding Mueller's full report.
The president directly attacked The New York Times' ethics, saying the story couldn't possibly be based on information from people with actual knowledge of what the report contains.
President Donald Trump lashed out at The New York Times on Thursday for claiming discontent among Speical Counsel Robret Mueller's team about how their final report was characterized by Attorney General William Barr
Trump claimed on Twitter that it would be illegal for Justice Department officials to leak anything to the Times, meaning they 'probably had no sources at all'
The Times fired back, saying reporters 'interviewed multiple government officials and others, but didn't say any of them had first-hand knowledge
The Times 'had no legitimate sources, which would be totally illegal,' he said, complaining about the kind of press leaks that have made large segments of his administration fertile hunting ground for journalists.
'In fact, they probably had no sources at all!' he said.
The paper's PR office tweeted a broadside back in the direction of the Oval Office.
'False,' read the tweet. 'Our reporters interviewed multiple government officials and others to gather the facts for the story.'
The article described conversations with 'government officials and others' who conveyed second- and third-hand information, including what some of Mueller's investigators reportedly 'told associates.'
Its central conclusion was that some on Mueller's team thought Barr's March 24 letter to a quartet of congressional leaders understated the seriousness of evidence that Trump obstructed justice.
The Washington Post, in its own story, reached some of the same decisions based on second-hand reporting about what 'members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates' about.
Both the Times and the Post reported that Mueller's team prepared its own report summaries with the expectation that they might be released to the public – something Barr, a Trump appointee, pre-empted with his own summary.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that members of Mueller's team say Barr did not accurately describe the findings of their investigation, which are more damaging to President Trump (seen above at the White House on Wednesday) than originally thought
The Justice Department said Thursday, however, the final Mueller report was littered with warnings about 'protected' material that would need to be vetted before any public release..
'Every page of the confidential report provided to Attorney General Barr on March 22, 2019 was marked may contain material protected under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) – a law that protects confidential grand jury information and therefore could not be publicly released,' according to a Justice Department statement Thursday.
'Given the extraordinary public interest in the matter, the attorney general decided to release the report’s bottom-line findings and its conclusions immediately without attempting to summarize the report, with the understanding that the report itself would be released after the redaction process,' according to the statement.
The statement reasserted what Barr wrote in his letter to Congress: 'He does not believe the report should be released in serial or piecemeal fashion.' It also said the department is 'continuing to work on redactions' – a process that Barr has said should allow him to provide a redacted report to Congress within weeks.
Trump has long complained about newspapers' unfavorable coverage of him, taking special aim at the use of unnamed sources to draw conclusions that impact elections and move markets.
He tweeted Thursday that the Times is a 'Fake News paper' that has previously 'been forced to apologize for their incorrect and very bad reporting on me!'
That's a recurring claim based on a Times editorial published days after the 2016 election in which the paper's publisher wrote about how his team would regroup after failing, like much of America's media industry, to understand the Trump phenomenon.
'We will rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you,' Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote, never directly apologizing to Trump or the paper's readers.
The Times reported Wednesday that some members of Mueller’s team believe Barr should have included more of their material in the summary he released on March 24 of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
The Times said the officials and other sources declined to flesh out why some of the special counsel’s investigators viewed their findings as potentially more damaging for the president than Barr explained.
It was also not clear
