Schiff: Nunes Is Wrong Only Dossier Used to Secure FISA Warrant, Yahoo Story Was Used Corroborate It
STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve read the underlying documents?
SCHIFF: I have and they voted that down. They voted against hearing from the FBI. When you do oversight, you haul them in under oath. You say why was this included, why wasn’t that included. The interest wasn’t oversight. The interest was a political hit job on the FBI in the service of the president.
STEPHANOPOULOS: They also point out in the memo, a quote from Andrew McCabe, the former Deputy Director of the FBI, who they say — said no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISA court without the Steele dossier information. I know you’ve said McCabe didn’t say that. Here’s how Chairman Nunes responded on Fox.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. DEVIN NUNES (R), CHAIR, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: That is definitely what he said. Not to mention we have other witnesses who said very similar things.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is it true that the FBI led the FISA application with the dossier?
NUNES: Yes, most of the — of the — the largest percentage of the — of the entire application has to do with the dossier and then using the news story to corroborate the dossier.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Your response to the Chairman?
SCHIFF: Well, the Chairman’s wrong. Now, the Chairman also hasn’t read the underlying materials. But for example, the argument that the Yahoo! News article was circular reporting because it was based on something Christopher Steele said, that’s not what the article was sited for. And if you read the application, you would know that’s not what the article was sited for. But the whole point here is not to be accurate, the point is to be misleading.
The Democrats didn’t even get to read the memo until minutes before it was voted out to the House. If they were truly interested in getting to the truth, that’s not the process that they would use. Instead, they used a vehicle that has never been used before in the history of the House to release this very one-sided memorandum. In terms of Andy McCabe, like the memorandum itself, they cherry-pick selectively in (ph) what he said.
Now, while I can’t go into the specifics of his testimony, I can tell what he said was that you have to look at a FISA application as a cohesive whole. All the parts are important. And the suggestion that the Chairman makes there and others on the committee have made also, that the entire dossier was included in this is just plain false.
