The leaks of the details of the calls between President Donald Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia in 2017 were the products of intelligence gathering, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview.
Nunes said that sources confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that the leaks of the calls between Trump and foreign leaders were based on intelligence products, prompting Nunes to investigate the matter.
“We knew right away in January that unmasking was occurring. Well, we knew the big one, the major one, was the Flynn transcript that was given out. And then you slowly had the Australian prime minister; you had the Mexican president, plus stories that we were seeing out in the mainstream news media. It was clear that somehow people were getting information from what appeared to be intelligence products,” Nunes said on Oct. 28.
“We had some sources that had come to us to tell us that this was happening. So finally, we were able to finally piece it together, and I was able to review it. And then once I saw what it was and it was much more than what I expected. And it had nothing to do with Russia.”
Nunes had previously revealed, in March 2017, that he had confirmed that the intelligence community incidentally collected the communications of Trump’s transition team and unmasked the names of ...
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today declared there is a “hidden agenda” behind the impeachment efforts of House Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and it is designed to tie up the U.S. Senate and derail efforts to confirm more pro-Second Amendment judges to the federal courts.
“It is clear to us that Capitol Hill anti-gunners are doing everything in their power to prevent confirmation of conservative judges who will adhere to the Constitution,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “By burdening the Senate with this nonsense, Democrats believe they can prevent confirmation of pro-Second Amendment judicial nominees during the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term.”
Gottlieb noted that the president is fulfilling perhaps his most important campaign pledge, which was to bring balance back to the federal courts. Restoring that balance could be the president’s greatest legacy, he said.
“The same people pushing impeachment have been staunch allies of the gun prohibition lobby,” Gottlieb observed. “Anti-gunners have been horrified since Day One of Donald Trump’s presidency that he was actually determined to rein in the activist federal court system by nominating judges who understand there are ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, and that the Second Amendment really means what it says.
“More than eleven years after the landmark 2008 Heller ruling and more than nine years after the 2010 McDonald decision,” he continued, “some courts still act as though neither of those Supreme Court rulings existed. But the president has been filling court vacancies with solid, intelligent...
Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
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Tim Morrison, a former National Security Council official under Trump, told Rep. Adam Schiff in testimony today that he was never concerned that Trump discussed anything illegal in his July 25 phone call with the Ukrainain president.
A top National Security Council (NSC) official who listened to President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky testified to Congress today that he did not believe Trump had discussed anything illegal during the conversation.
“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” former NSC Senior Director for European Affairs Tim Morrison testified today, according to a record of his remarks obtained by The Federalist.
Morrison testified that Ukrainian officials were not even aware that certain military funding had been delayed by the Trump administration until late August 2019, more than a month after the Trump-Zelensky call, casting doubt on allegations that Trump somehow conveyed an illegal quid pro quo demand during the July 25 call.
“I have no reason to believe the Ukrainians had any knowledge of the [military funding] review until August 28, 2019,” Morrison said. That is the same day that Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chief anti-Trump inquisitor in the U.S. House of Representatives, disclosed on Twitter that funding had been held up. Politico also published a story that day, sourced to anonymous leaks, that military funding had been temporarily held up.
Although Schiff claimed that neither he nor his staff ever spoke to the anti-Trump whistleblower, The New York Times reported that the complainant, whom RealClearInvestigations identified as Eric Ciaramella, coordinated with Schiff’s office before filing his complaint with the intelligence community inspector general on August 12. While Schiff initially demanded that the anti-Trump complainant be allowed to publicly testify, he quickly changed course following the reports that he and his staff had secretly colluded with the whistleblower and then lied about the interactions.
Morrison also pointed out key factual inaccuracies in testimony provided by William Taylor, a State Department official who works in the U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine. Morrison said that, contrary to Taylor’s claims, Morrison never met with the Ukrainian National Security advisor in his private hotel room.
Morrison also said Taylor falsely claimed that Ambassador Gordon Sondland demanded a public statement from the Ukrainian president committing to investigate Burisma, a controversial Ukrainain energy company that paid Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars to sit on its board.
“My recollection is that Ambassador Sondland’s proposal to [Ukrainian National Security Advisor Andriy] Yermak was that it could be sufficient if the new Ukrainian prosecutor general — not President Zelensky — would commit to pursue the Burisma investigation,” Morrison testified.
Morrison testified that the transcript of the phone call that was declassified and released by Trump in late September “accurately and completely reflects the substance of the call,” and that he was concerned that the substance of the call would be leaked to the media. Morrison said he immediately informed a NSC lawyer about his concerns that the phone call would be leaked. Democrats have alleged that security measures taken to prevent leaks of the top secret call transcript prove that Trump should be removed from office.
He also told lawmakers that the national security process worked as designed in the case of...
