Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., asked on Wednesday “what the hell” Obama administration officials were doing after they purportedly requested to "unmask" the identity of former national security adviser Michael Flynn during the presidential transition period.
The House Intelligence Committee ranking member asked the question on “Fox News @Night” after a list of names from that controversial process was made public on Wednesday.
“It appears to me like what they were doing is a lot of them went wild after Trump won. They got poisoned with this Russia hoax,” Nunes said.
“That's why you had Obama ambassadors across the globe unmasking, all of them were just unmasking and then leaking out about anyone within the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team that they could and you had the media who were taking those leaks.”
The list was declassified in recent days by Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and then sent to GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who made the documents public. The roster features top-ranking figures, including then-Vice President Joe Biden.
“When you look at intelligence product, it doesn't mean that it's fact and it's classified so the fact that they would be taking that information, unmasking whoever that was and leaking it to the press, it's a big problem,” Nunes said on Wednesday.
“What on earth were these high ranking Obama officials doing unmasking these reports in the first place?” Nunes asked.
He then went on to point out that “we get finished intelligence product reports in the Congress.”
“We have never requested to unmask any American at all. So why, in the waning days of the Obama administration, would they be doing this?” Nunes asked.
He said he thinks “there’s only one logical conclusion.”
“Joe Biden in his office and McDonough, they were all doing what the rest of them had been doing for the few months after the election," Nunes said. "They were unmasking anyone and everyone so that they could leak information to a press that was willing to take that illegal information to build a fake, phony narrative, to set up numerous people on the Trump team, not just General Flynn.”
He went on to note that "General Flynn paid a big price for it because he was put under investigation by the dirty cops at the FBI and the Clinton campaign in 2016.”
Last week, the Justice Department moved to drop its case against Flynn, in a stunning development that comes after internal memos were released raising serious questions about the nature of the investigation that led to Flynn’s late 2017 guilty plea of lying to the FBI.
In a special new episode of Fox Nation's "Witch Hunt," hosted by Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett, Nunes spoke about this and much more in an extensive discussion of the Flynn case and the Russian collusion probe.
"We're looking at doing criminal referrals on the Mueller team, the Mueller dossier team, the Mueller witch hunt, whatever you want to call it. That's where we are now in our investigation," he said.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman and David Spunt contributed to this report.