[Washington Examiner] Congressman Devin Nunes filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against opposition research firm Fusion GPS, its founder Glenn Simpson, and left-leaning watchdog group Campaign for Accountability, accusing them of "racketeering" and interfering with his congressional Trump-Russia investigation.
Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until Democrats won the majority in 2018, claimed that Simpson, Fusion GPS, and the Campaign for Accountability illegally conspired to "harass" him in an attempt to "hinder, delay, prevent, or dissuade" him from looking into issues surrounding the federal investigation into the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and to scare him off from investigating possible wrongdoing by Simpson and Fusion GPS.
The California Republican is asking the judge to award him $9.9 million in damages.
The 35-page complaint Nunes filed in the Eastern District of Virginia today pointed to a Daily Caller article from early August that revealed the Campaign for Accountability hired Fusion GPS as an "independent contractor" in 2018 and paid the firm close to $140,000 for research. And the Nunes lawsuit alleged the watchdog group and the opposition research firm then colluded to target him and stymie his efforts, pointing to three ethics complaints filed by the Campaign for Accountability allegedly "in concert with" Fusion GPS in an effort to "chill reporting of Fusion GPS and Simpson’s wrongdoing" and to dissuade Nunes from making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
Nunes described Fusion GPS as "a political war room for hire that specializes in dirty tricks and smears" and the Campaign for Accountability as a "dark money, partisan, left-wing" nonprofit that he said targets mainly conservatives. |