The Department of Justice spied on congressional staff working under then-Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., as the Republican lawmaker investigated FBI abuses amid the Russia hoax.
On Thursday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding answers about agency surveillance of Republican staff on Capitol Hill.In 2017, Google reportedly received subpoenas for private emails and records belonging to two Republican staffers of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) while HPSCI was investigating the FBI’s misconduct,” Jordan wrote. “These subpoenas only came to light in 2022 due to Google’s policy of alerting customers five years after law enforcement takes such action.”At that time, Nunes was the Republican ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee while Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif, ran a deep-state campaign to maliciously frame President Donald Trump as a Russian agent. Schiff was censured by the lower chamber last month for abusing his role on the Intelligence Committee to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election.Nunes retired from Congress in January last year to run Trump’s online alternative to Twitter, Truth Social. As the No. 2 lawmaker on the Intelligence Committee, Nunes was instrumental in pushing back on trumped-up claims of Russian collusion.
Jordan now wants to know whether the FBI subpoenas to Google seeking information from Nunes’ staff were submitted in “retaliation for HSPCI’s oversight of the FBI.”
In May, Special Counsel John Durham published his long-awaited report on the Russia-collusion hoax, which found that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
