Appearing on FOX News Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. called the release of the Nunes memo “sweet revenge” for him and his family.
Said Trump: “There is a little bit of sweet revenge in it for me and certainly probably the family in a sense that if they wouldn't have done this, this stuff would be going on. This would be going on at the highest levels of government. They'd be continuing doing it to my father, trying to undermine his actions.”
.@DonaldJTrumpJr on the memo: "Imagine how effective [@realDonaldTrump] can be, given the year he's had, without this cloud over his head." https://t.co/yb9zbeS8tq pic.twitter.com/jj5vvXn0Fm
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 4, 2018
Unfortunately for Trump Jr., what has been revealed by the memo is that George Papadopoulos, not the Steele dossier, triggered the investigation into the Trump campaign:
A four-page memo released by the House Intelligence Committee on Friday alleges that the FBI and the Department of Justice used politically motivated intelligence to obtain surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. But the memo's final paragraph admits that federal law enforcement's probe into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia was triggered by a different loud-mouthed campaign adviser rather than the controversial Steele dossier.
“The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos,” the Nunes memo reads. “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok.”
The memo also reveals that the FBI was already on former Trump adviser Carter Page, who bragged that he was an adviser to the Kremlin in 2013.
