Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) Tuesday night invited House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) to release the content of his phone calls with Rudy Giuliani last April because he has nothing to hide.
“I don’t know—maybe they have the recordings of my phone calls with Rudy Giuliani,” Nunes told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “They’re welcome to play them because everything I spoke with Rudy Giuliani about is nothing that I wouldn’t care if the American people found out.”
In what Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called a “remarkable abuse” of President Trump’s constitutional rights, Schiff on Tuesday released phone records of the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani as part of the House Intelligence Committee’s Impeachment report.
Schiff declined to explain how the House obtained the phone records.
Nunes told Hannity that he had spoken with Giuliani after former special counsel Robert Mueller had “completely bombed and flamed out” and that they had laughed about it.
The special counsel released its Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election on April 18, and prior to that—on March 24—Attorney General William Barr revealed that it found no collusion in a summary of its “principal conclusions.”
The phone records show that the California Republican also spoke with Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate who was recently indicted on campaign finance charges, but Nunes said he didn’t remember specifically talking to the Ukrainian-American. According to Hannity, at least three out of the four calls with Parnas were actually between Nunes and Giuliani, who was using Parnas’ phone.
Nunes explained that because the Intelligence Committee provides oversight, members have Americans and foreigners contacting them every day with information and that it was “possible” that he spoke with Parnas.
“I haven’t gone through all my phone records,” he said. “But it seems very unlikely that I would be taking calls from random people.” He also questioned why CNN would rely on the word of an indicted scam artist for their stories.
Nunes is suing CNN over its report—based on Parnas’ claims— that he secretly traveled to Vienna last year to meet with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin to “dig up dirt on Biden.” Nunes told Hannity that he has been clear from the moment the story came out that it was “demonstrably false,” saying he was actually in Benghazi, Libya and Malta during the time CNN reported he was in Vienna.
“Anything we have from Parnas and his lawyers—any game that they’re up to—we’re going to work directly with the Justice Department to make sure that these guys aren’t just trying to obstruct justice, to obstruct our congressional investigation, or to lie to Congress,” Nunes said.
The congressman, who is asking for more than $435 million in compensatory and punitive damages in his lawsuit against CNN, pointed out that Democrats could have corrected CNN because they have his travel records. Instead, they sat back and allowed Nunes to be smeared.
“They wanted that story to be printed,” he fumed.