Politics

‘Frightening’: Devin Nunes Says FBI Informant ‘Made Up A Bunch Of Lies’ About Michael Flynn

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California Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that newly declassified FBI documents show that a confidential source for the bureau lied about former national security adviser Michael Flynn during the early days of the Russia probe in 2016.

“When you go through that it’s frightening. Imagine being spied upon by your own government, and then that spy makes up a bunch of lies about everybody,” Nunes said in an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“They framed General Flynn,” the Republican added.

Nunes was referring to an FBI memo released this week of an interview that investigators conducted on Aug. 11, 2016, with Stefan Halper, a former Cambridge professor and longtime confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI.

According to the declassified FBI memo, Halper told agents that he witnessed an encounter at the University of Cambridge in 2014 between Flynn and a Russian-British graduate student named Svetlana Lokhova.

Flynn was invited to speak at the university when he served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Halper claimed that he saw Flynn and Lokhova leave the event together and that they took a train to London, according to the memo. The same allegation about Flynn’s Cambridge trip would appear in media reports in March 2017.

William Barnett, an FBI special agent who led the investigation of Flynn, determined that the information from Halper was “not plausible” and likely “not accurate.”

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Lokhova and her husband have vehemently denied the claim to The Daily Caller News Foundation. They both say they left the Cambridge event together. Flynn also called the allegation “ridiculous” during an interview on Nov. 29, 2017 with the special counsel’s team.

Nunes said Sunday that the information from the memo should have been provided to Congress years ago, when Republicans were investigating the FBI’s intelligence-gathering activities against the Trump campaign.

“This is evidence that should have been brought…nearly four years ago,” Nunes told Maria Bartiromo.

“We should have seen what they were doing and how they were running spies into the campaign.”