FBI Has Evidence That ‘Directly Refutes’ Premise Of Trump-Russia Probe, @RepRatcliffe Says dailycaller.com/2018/10/14/fbi… via @dailycaller
Republicans have suggested that the info related to George Papadopoulos former Trump campaign adviser whose conversation with an Australian diplomat, is what prompted the FBI to open its investigation into the Trump campaign.
Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe provided Sunday the clearest picture to date of what the FBI allegedly withheld from the surveillance court.
Ratcliffe suggested that the FBI failed to include any evidence regarding former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
The FBI opened its investigation on July 31, 2016, after receiving information from the Australian government about a conversation that Papadopoulos had on May 10, 2016, with Alexander Downer, the top Australian diplomat to the U.K.
Downer claimed that Papadopoulos told him that Russians had derogatory information on Hillary Clinton.
But Ratcliffe, a top member of the House Judiciary Committee, suggested on Sunday that the FBI and Justice Department had information that contradicted its intelligence on Papadopoulos.
“...if the DOJ and the FBI have a piece of evidence that directly refutes that, directly contradicts that, what you would expect is for the DOJ to present both sides of the coin to the FISA Court to evaluate the weight and sufficiency of that evidence,” Ratcliffe said.
“Instead, what happened here was Department of Justice and FBI officials in the Obama administration in October of 2016 only presented to the court the evidence that made the government’s case to get a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign associate,” he added.
Ratcliffe said that declassification of a batch of FBI and Justice Department documents “would corroborate” his claims about the Papadopoulos intelligence.
