Dan Bongino reacts to accusations connecting Brookings Institution to Steele dossier
'It is the biggest political scandal in our history, 'says Dan Bongino reacting to Rep. Devin Nunes expanding the Russia probe into the Brookings Institution
The Russia investigation revolved around a “dirty football of fake information,” which was used to “hijack the justice system and spy on a presidential candidate,” former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino told “Fox & Friends” on Monday.
Bongino made the comment one day after House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News' “Sunday Morning Futures” that his committee has “now expanded [their] investigation, full-blown investigation, into the Brookings Institute.”
Nunes said that the Brookings Institute “is the prominent left-wing think tank here in our nation’s capital.”
Nunes' announcement came one day after the primary source for Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier was revealed as a United States resident who once co-wrote a research paper for Brookings showing Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized his dissertation.
“You have you this dirty football of fake information, it's made up, attributed to real people who are sensitive sources,” Bongino said on Monday. “How those people got the sensitive source's name to put on the fake football, that's the question.”
He went on to say that the “fake football” is then “passed around to the State Department, the FBI, everywhere who will touch it.”
“And you basically have a massive information laundering scandal where fake information is made to look real to hijack the justice system and spy on a presidential candidate,” Bongino added. “It is the biggest political scandal in our history. There is no longer any doubt amongst serious people.”
Brookings Institute came into the picture after a lawyer for Igor Danchenko, 42, confirmed to The New York Times that his client – a former Brookings Institution senior research analyst in Washington, D.C., and not a "Russian-based" source – had provided the information to Steele, the British former spy whose dossier was used by the FBI to obtain wiretaps of Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser.
On Sunday, Nunes said, “We think there is a connection between the president of Brookings and those dossiers that were given to the State Department that mirrored the Steele dossiers.”
“This was the Clinton campaign’s dossiers. It was the dirt. It was a phony story that they sold not only to the American people, but they sold it and corrupted our FBI, where it appears these dirty cops were more than willing to take this information to present it to the FISA court,” Nunes said.
He added, “We’ve now expanded our investigation, full-blown investigation, into the Brookings Institute and it really centers on two issues.”
“One is the IRS. This is a tax-exempt organization. They’re supposed to stay out of politics. They clearly have not done that. They’ve obstructed our investigation with propaganda for the last four years,” Nunes said. “It’s well-known that they’ve attacked our investigation for four years through this kind of phony legal group of fact-checkers that they set up. So we need to look in there to see if they’re involved in politics.”
Dean Patterson, an IRS spokesperson, told Fox News, “Federal law prohibits the IRS from discussing specific taxpayers.”
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Nunes said the second issue is that the Brookings Institute allegedly accepts “foreign money from foreign countries and foreign governments.”
“We need to know what foreign governments were involved in this because were they acting on behalf of a foreign power?” Nunes said on Sunday.
Reacting to Nunes’ comments, Bongino went on to say that all those who were passing the “dirty football of fake information” were “working together.”
“It's not a conspiracy theory. It's a conspiracy, but it’s not theoretical. They all knew each other is my point,” Bongino said.
“As Devin Nunes said, and he is right, you have now an organization, some tax-exempt or some tax-privileged organization, that's playing an essential role, apparently or allegedly by some, in an information laundering scandal trying to basically hijack the justice system to get a FISA warrant,” Bongino added.
“They were tools to take fake information, put the patina of reality on it, by putting real people’s names on it and then using it to spy on a candidate.”
Bongino said that “there were two people here who are super important.”
Those people include “the primary sub-source” who “has a credible work history, if you get what I mean,” he said.
“His name is slapped on fake information even though he didn't say it,” Bongino said. “Did they know that? It appears the FBI did.”
He said the second person is Steele.
“You have Christopher Steele's name slapped on this Steele dossier even though Steele acknowledged the information wasn't his,” Bongino said.
“You have to ask yourself, Why did they do that? Because Steele was a former Russian expert. So they knew if they slapped his name on it that it would appear real even though it wasn't.”
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A spokesperson for the Brookings Institute did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.
Fox News’ Marisa Schultz contributed to this report.
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