In an interview with Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) said the demonstrably fake news MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow published against him earlier this year is putting him, his family, and his staff in danger from people who believe the false allegations.
This past week Nunes filed a defamation lawsuit against Maddow for claiming he received a package from a Russia-connected Ukrainian under sanctions from the United States, a man named Andriy Derkach, and lying on her program that Nunes hid this from the FBI. “He [Nunes] has refused to show the contents of the package to other members of the intelligence community. He has refused to hand it over to the FBI which is what you should do if you get something from somebody who is sanctioned by the U.S. as a Russian agent.”
Nunes is suing NBCUniversal, the parent company of MSNBC, for damages and a demand for a retraction and apology. “The bottom line is with Maddow and MSNBC, what was going on is, they were consistently doing what I would say is quasi-fake news, knifing me in the back as it related to the Russia hoax, and it was always silly stuff like ‘are they working for Russians? They must be part of Putin’s team—what’s going on?’ That kind of stuff…
“But in the springtime Maddow out of nowhere — we don’t even know where this came from — just went out and accused me of having meetings with Russians and accepting packages from some guy named Derkach and then [she said] I refused to turn it over to the FBI,” Nunes went on.
“All they had to do was publicly tweet out, at the time, tweet out ‘hey we apologize, we got this story wrong,’ and then she should have went on the air and said ‘hey I ran a story last week or whatever and we apologize to Devin Nunes.’ Right? That’s all they had to do,” Nunes said. “But now they let it stay out there, let it stay out there and look this is the problem with his—there are people out there, millions of Americans, who believe this crap. It creates a scenario where it puts me, my family, and my staff in danger because you get these crazed lunatics out there who believe I’m some sort of Russian agent and a traitor so you never know—people just might out of the blue think that they might run up and shoot somebody because they believe this stuff. I mean, this is serious stuff. They run that and then I start getting death threats, right? So, this is not some joke. She may think it’s a joke. But we don’t even know where the hell this came from because it’s so asinine…
“I just hope eventually we’re going to get to a point in this country where these — I hope that all news agencies are held accountable,” Nunes added.