Hours after the House Intelligence Committee released call logs on Tuesday that revealed ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA) had multiple phone calls with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s indicted Ukrainian associate Lev Parnas this past spring, Nunes appeared on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show.
According to the pro-Trump Republican lawmaker, the calls with individuals at the heart of the impeachment inquiry against the president were joking in nature—or maybe didn’t even happen at all (despite records saying they did).
After talking about Nunes’ lawsuit against CNN over the network’s report that the congressman met with a former Ukrainian prosecutor in Vienna (Nunes has also threatened The Daily Beast with a suit), Hannity brought up the phone calls while offering Nunes a helping hand.
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“My sources are telling me that three of the four so-called calls were apparently just to Giuliani and maybe on Parnas’ phone and under a minute,” the Trump-boosting Fox host wondered. “Is that true?”
Claiming he’s known Giuliani for a very long time, Nunes insisted that he was speaking to the former New York City mayor quite a bit in April due to the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference.
“And during that time, if you remember, that was right when Robert Mueller completely bombed and flamed out,” Nunes recalled. “So, I remember talking to Rudy Giuliani. And we were actually laughing about how Mueller bombed out.”
The California lawmaker went on to say that if there were recordings of the calls, “they are welcome to play them,” as he “wouldn’t care if the American people found out.”
“Did you ever talk to this guy Les Parnas or whatever his name is?” Hannity asked, mispronouncing the Giuliani henchman’s name while acting like he barely knows who Parnas is.
“You know, it’s possible,” Nunes replied. “I haven’t gone through my phone records. I don’t really recall that name.”
“I remember the name now because he has been indicted,” the conservative congressman added. “Why would CNN rely on somebody like this? I will go back and check my records, but it seems very unlikely I will be taking calls from random people.”
The phone logs, meanwhile, showed that one of the calls between Parnas and Nunes lasted nearly nine minutes.
