***Article first published by 'The Washington Examiner' on July 28, 2019***

Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the CIA has "come clean" for his review of the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation.
But during a Fox News interview Sunday, he said former CIA Director John Brennan still needs to answer questions.

Host Maria Bartiromo asked the California congressman which agency, the FBI or CIA, was more likely to have lined up confidential sources to make contact with members of the Trump campaign, under suspicion for ties to Russia.

“Well, as you know, we have jurisdiction over both FBI and CIA and what they do overseas," Nunes said on Sunday Morning Futures. "We have lots of information about FBI people going overseas and doing things, we don’t really have any information from CIA."

He added, "So far, they’ve really come clean. I would say the only one who has questions to answer is John Brennan, because we now know that John Brennan briefed Harry Reid on the dossier in August 2016. At the same time he never briefed me or Paul Ryan who was the speaker of the House at the time.”

Nunes was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time.

The dossier, put together by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, contained a litany of unverified claims about President Trump's ties to Russia and was used extensively in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify surveillance of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Steele compiled the dossier while he was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which itself was being funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The possible misuse of the Steele dossier in the FISA Court is the subject of an investigation by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, whose report is expected to be released after Labor Day.

Although Republicans are not in control of the committee now, Nunes has carried on an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, looking for possible politically motivated misconduct by federal agents, particularly if they were unfairly targeting Trump and his campaign.

Nunes has asked a slew of agencies, including the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and State Department, for documents related to key figures in 2016, including Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious man who told former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos the Russians had damaging information on Clinton and set in motion a chain of events that led to what the FBI said was the start of its counterintelligence investigation in July of that year.

In August 2016, Brennan is said to have contacted then-Minority Leader Harry Reid and told him Russia was trying to help Trump win the election. He claimed members of his campaign might be colluding with them, using the salacious and unverified dossier from Steele. Reid then wrote a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey about his concerns of Russian interference in the election, which was quickly made public.

There has been an ongoing back-and-forth battle in the press, largely shrouded in mystery and citing unnamed sources, over whether it was Brennan or Comey who attempted to include the unverified Trump dossier in the high-profile intelligence community assessment of January 2017 that focused on Russian interference, with each camp pointing a finger at the other.

A spokesman for Brennan insisted he never trusted the dossier, telling the Associated Press, “because it wasn’t corroborated intel." And a source told the Washington Times in September 2018 that Brennan worked to make sure the dossier was not included in the intelligence community assessment.

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, however, has repeatedly put the blame on Brennan, tweeting: “A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report."

Bob Woodward, the veteran Watergate sleuth, wrote in his 2018 book Fear that, despite the unverified nature of the allegations, “Brennan said the information was in line with their own sources.” Woodward said in an interview earlier this year that “I think it was the CIA pushing this” and that “early in building the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box.”

But Brennan himself said in February 2018 that the dossier “did not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessment that was done and that was presented to then-President Obama and then-President-elect Trump.” Brennan said that “there were things in that dossier that made me wonder whether they were in fact accurate and true” and said that “it was up to the FBI to see whether or not they could verify any of it.”

“I think Jim Comey said it contained salacious and unverified information,” Brennan said.