“There are players now that were involved in part of this with the FBI-DOJ.”
Rep. Mark Meadows said forthcoming documents will prove that the “deep state” launched a “coordinated effort” to bring down President Donald Trump.
Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, the Republican congressman from North Carolina said that the Justice Department and sitting ambassadors were part of the alleged scheme.
“It’s additional information that is coming out that will show not only was there no collusion, but there was a coordinated effort to take this president down,” Meadows said on the air. “We talk about the ‘deep state.’ There are players now, even ambassadors, that are sitting ambassadors, that were involved in part of this with the FBI-DOJ.”
While he did not name any ambassadors, Meadows said the release of currently classified documents would give Americans the opportunity to judge for themselves.
“As we look at this, it’s time to show that we show the American people what’s out there, declassify some of those documents,” he said. “I think when the American people see what I’ve seen, they will judge for themselves and know that this has all been a hoax.”
Meadows is a member of the House Oversight Committee, which was half of a task force that along with the House Judiciary Committee investigated potential anti-Trump bias in the Justice Department and the FBI.
Democrats have dismissed the probe as an attempt to distract from investigations of Trump, pointing out that both the task force and an inspector general investigation into the Department of Justice and FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation failed to find evidence of systemic bias or wrongdoing.
However, on closing the Republican investigation last December, its heads said they had “revealed troubling facts which exacerbated our initial questions and concerns.” They called on the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate further.
Starting earlier this month, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Doug Collins of Georgie, has been releasing transcripts of private testimonies given to the task force.
He has so far made public the testimonies of Justice Department Official Brue Ohr, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and all of which were provided last summer.
Ohr disclosed that during the 2016 presidential campaign, he served as an unofficial backchannel between the FBI and former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the “Trump dossier,” which was a basis of the FBI’s probe of Trump Russia ties.
Strzok denied the Justice Department inspector general’s conclusion that he had prioritized the FBI’s Trump investigation, which he led, over an investigation into then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, which he was also part of. He also said that text messages he had sent disparaging Trump to Page, with whom he was having an affair, were misconstrued to sound worse than they were.
Page testified that the bureau discussed a “gross negligence” charge against Clinton for her mishandling of classified emails, but the Justice Department shut down the idea.
Rep. John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican, asked Page to clarify whether Department of Justice prosecutors explicitly refused to bring the charge against Clinton.
“When you say advice you got from the department, you’re making it sound like it was the department that told you: ‘You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to,’” he said.
Page responded: “That’s correct.”
Strzok and Page also worked for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which is expected to soon issue its findings on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia or the president obstructed justice. Strzok was removed from the investigation after his texts were discovered and was later fired by the FBI. Page also left the Mueller team and the FBI after the controversy.
