Mark Meadows: ‘Highly likely’ FISA abuse investigation spawns more criminal referrals

WaEx: Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., says he expects more criminal referrals will be sent to the Justice Department based on an inspector general’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse investigation.

Last week, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., sent a notification letter to Attorney General William Barr saying his team “identified several potential violations of the law” as part of an investigation into origins of the Trump-Russia investigation and hopes to set up a meeting to discuss.

During an interview on Fox News, Meadows said it is “highly likely” more criminal referrals will follow that “correspond with what [Congressman] Nunes has already put forth.”

“The big story that has not been told … [are] leaks to the Washington post and the New York Times that would indicate well beyond what the FBI should have been doing in terms of classified information and I’m sure that the IG will look at that, but more importantly go even beyond that when attorney general Barr looks at the broader accept of this investigation,” the GOP investigator said on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Meadows, a member of the House Oversight Committee, met with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz last week along with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. In a Fox News interview on Tuesday, Jordan said Horowitz told them he “expects” a report on his investigation into possible FISA abuse by the DOJ and FBI “in May or June,” confirming what Barr testified earlier in the day to a congressional panel.

Horowitz announced the initiation of the FISA abuse investigation in March 2018 after requests from both then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Republican members in Congress. The lawmakers claimed the Justice Department and FBI had abused the FISA process and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in their investigation and surveillance of President Trump and his associates during the campaign, as well as during the Trump administration.

Onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page was the subject of a FISA warrant and three renewals.

During his interview Sunday, host Maria Bartiromo asked Meadows to explain how the FBI “used” the media by leaking “fake news” to use as evidence for the FISA application process.

“What we would find is people within the department of justice primarily the FBI would actually give information to the media, then those reports would actually come out and they would say ‘Wow, we have these reports now,’ and then they would take the actual reports and use those as the probable cause to do a further investigation,” Meadows said. “It was a big circular reasoning. You’ll see all of that come out, I believe, when inspector general’s report comes out.”   more here