House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes announced Wednesday night that the Department of Justice had agreed to turn over to the committee all documents and witnesses related to Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.
“After speaking to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein this evening, I believe the House Intelligence Committee has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice that will provide the committee with access to all the documents and witnesses we have requested,” Nunes said in a statement emailed to press. “The committee looks forward to receiving access to the documents over the coming days.”
The California Republican, a staunch Trump supporter, has repeatedly tried to redirect House Intel’s own investigation to targets other than the president. Nunes has focused in particular on intelligence gathered by research firm Fusion GPS in the form of a dossier of raw intelligence that was leaked to Buzzfeed a year ago.
Nunes stepped down from the probe in April amid investigations that he had disclosed classified information, leaving the probe’s leadership with fellow Republican Mike Conaway. But Nunes continued to use the committee’s subpoena power in August to request documents related to the FBI’s own involvement in putting together the dossier, which the Bureau has said do not exist.
The FBI also refused to respond to the subpoena with documents related to “FBI confidential human sources,” Nunes said in a letter made public last week. He also threatened deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray with contempt of Congress, a move that drew censure from fellow Republicans.
Nunes’s ethics probe focused on his assertion that someone—he refused to say who—had told him that Donald Trump was under surveillance by American intelligence during his campaign. Nunes later backed down from the statement and was cleared of any wrongdoing by an ethics investigation in December, though in September, CNN reported that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had indeed been wiretapped as a result of a classified FISA warrant.
