Rep. Devin Nunes: Optimistic on John Durham Probe of Russia Hoax

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) said he was “optimistic” about special counsel John Durham’s investigation of the “Russia hoax” in an interview on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

“I’ve been probably the only guy in America who’s actually had confidence in John Durham,” Nunes remarked. “I’ve been saying this for a very long time, and that’s largely because he’s run a very closed investigation, unlike what you saw with [Robert] Mueller’s, and it’s an investigation like they should be, where you don’t have leaks to the fake news companies.”

He added, “I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Durham’s investigation led to a grand jury’s indictment of Michael Sussman — a lawyer who recently resigned from Perkins Coie — for making a false statement to the Fderal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Sussman is alleged to have lied about his representation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign when he requested a meeting with the FBI’s general counsel to accuse the Trump Organization of “covert communications” with a Russian bank.

“Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias, a key figure in the ‘Russia collusion’ hoax, has parted ways with the Perkins Coie law firm, ahead of the anticipated release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report into the origins of the Russia inquiry,” Breitbart News reported August 22.

Nunes said FBI indictments for making false statements are typically “used as a secondary charge” due to insufficient confidence in evidence to successfully convicting a suspect on other charges. Sussman’s alleged deception in presenting himself as a concerned citizen in his request for a meeting with the FBI, Nunes assessed, was a textbook example of making false statements to the Bureau.

“In this case, it is a quintessential definition of an indictment of lying to the FBI that I think is really a slam dunk,” Nunes determined,  “and now the question becomes, can Durham get the next set of charges, which would be the larger conspiracy? No one believes that Sussman and all these cats at the FBI and the Clinton campaign … didn’t know about this, right?”

Nunes said Sussman presented himself as “just some guy that happens to be a political lawyer [who] in there and says, ‘Oh my god, I’m just a good citizen. You can’t believe that all this evidence that we have of Trump and Russia.'”

“This is the first step, hopefully, of many,” Nunes added. 

Nunes warned of “two big impediments” to Durham’s investigation, with the first being the overwhelmingly partisan Democrat and left-wing political composition of Washington, D.C., from which grand jury members will be selected for Durham’s pursuit of indictment.

Nunes said the Durham probe’s second obstacle is Attorney General Merrick Garland heading the Department of Justice, who he described as “very dangerous” and “a hack for the Obama-Biden-Harris team.”

“[The Durham investigation] has implications for the Democratic Party,” Nunes stated. “Their top lawyers have been erased from the Perkins Coie law firm, so clearly the partners of Perkins Coie know there’s a problem. These are characters that misled us and didn’t give us all the information in Congress. They slow-rolled us, and I’m talking about all of them, all the [intelligence community] people, all the Clinton people.”

He concluded, “It was very, very difficult to for us to unpeel and unravel this mystery on how they were trying to tie Russia to Republicans, and then ultimately it led to the impeachment of Trump and a lots of phony and fake prosecutions.”