A Russian lawyer's admission she was a Kremlin informant when she met with Donald Trump Jr. and others at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign shows House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., brought the investigation into allegations President Donald Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to a halt "way too early," fellow committee member Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said Monday.
"It shows the absurdity of Nunes bringing the investigation to an end way too early," Himes told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "Most importantly, from the standpoint of the investigation, before we followed up on the most rudimentary of leads and pushed back on a number of the president's key people who refused to answer questions."
The New York Times reported last week the attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had told the paper: "I am a lawyer, and I am an informant. Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general."
In addition to that revelation, the people closest to Trump, such as former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski asserted executive privilege rather than giving a full testimony, and "Congress should have pushed back on that," Himes said.
The Intelligence Committee, until now, had been one where people could find agreement across party lines, Himes said, but he can pinpoint when that stopped happening.
"It was the moment in the open hearing in front of my committee about a year ago, when Jim Comey said 'the Department of Justice has authorized me to publicly disclose that there is an investigation into the possibility of collusion between Trump, the Trump campaign and Russia,'" Himes said. "In that moment you can, I mean, metaphorically, you can imagine the White House catching fire and you can imagine very shortly thereafter people in the White House calling the chairman of the committee and saying 'hey, you've been a friend, you've been around, and now you did this to us.'"
At that point, Himes said, "which you know, I was not privy to, was the moment when all of a sudden the Intelligence Committee became a mechanism for the defense of the White House, the president, and his campaign."
Himes also said when Trump says there was no collusion between him and his campaign, "I think he's thinking . . . I never sat down with Vladimir Putin and signed a contract, that in exchange for releasing the emails we're going to get you 200,000 votes in Ohio and Michigan."
But nobody, "certainly" the Russians, would not do that, Himes said.
"The Russians would do exactly what they did," he said. "They would have people sending out feelers. You showed the clip earlier, a lot of people sending out feelers to people like Don Jr., which happened, to people like [Michael] Flynn and others, Carter Paige, they would do it much more subtly. So, Americans expecting some Hollywood blockbuster ending that has Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump signing an oath, that's not going to be the outcome here."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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