Exclusive: Rep. Devin Nunes—‘Biden Team Is Putting on a Facade That They’ve Won’

Big tech and corporate media played an outsized role in the 2020 election, says California Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes. And based on how the Biden team is responding to evidence of election irregularities and potential fraud, former Vice President Biden does not seem confident in victory, Nunes says.

To actually get their ideas out to Americans, Nunes says conservatives should move to social media alternatives such as Parler and Rumble, ones that prioritize free speech and open discourse.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Jan Jekielek: Congressman Devin Nunes, it’s great to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Rep. Devin Nunes: Great to be with you. Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek: Right now, you’re probably aware that The Epoch Times is not calling a winner in the presidential election. We’re not going to do that until the challenges and the legal challenges and so forth are resolved. An increasing number of Americans, based on polls, are believing that former Vice President Biden is the president-elect. What are your thoughts?

Rep. Nunes: The first I have is that in any contested election, and in this case there’s multiple states that are within just a sliver of flipping one way or the other, we never call local city council races that are this close, we never call members of Congress that are this close. In fact, we’ve got five or six right now that are still too close to be called. Some are already in a recount. So that’s what I think.

There’s a false media narrative that’s been created to move us past the election, it started essentially election night. And they were ready to call Biden the winner [on] election night, even though he was behind in six or seven states that he’s now pulled ahead in.

So it’s critically important that we make sure that all of these elections are certified and that the American people have confidence in the integrity of our election systems. Without that, begins a type of collapse of people’s confidence that we’re already seeing across government, whether it’s with the Department of Justice, or the FBI, etc., etc.

I don’t think that any of this is done. Obviously, Biden’s ahead in all of these states, so he’s in the pole position. But we need to make sure that there was a free and fair election here.

Mr. Jekielek: So there are a number of lawsuits as we speak, there are recounts being done. From what I understand, there’s even some attempts to change rules around recounts as recounts are being funded. I think in Wisconsin, there’s been some information about this. But let’s talk about the irregularities, and potential fraud, and actual fraud that has already been discovered. Where do things stand from a kind of bird’s eye view in your mind?

Rep. Nunes: One general thing that sticks out, in my mind, is that the Biden team is putting on a facade that they’ve won. But in reality, they’re not acting like people who just won an election. It’s very, very strange. If you look at the Democrats that we’re working with—we’re here in Washington, back here this week after the election—these are essentially people that aren’t acting very confident.

And when you start to look at changing rules, like you mentioned in Wisconsin, that’s a red flag. Why would you need to change any rules? Why would you be moving quickly to call these elections? If you look at what happened in Michigan, in Wayne County, you had what appeared to be the doxing of two Republicans that were on the Election Commission. Those are not the thoughts and the actions of people that are confident in their victory.

The best possible thing that Biden can do after they got smashed in this election by Republicans across the board, except for the presidency. This was a total destruction for them. They put in billions of dollars, whether it was to win state legislative races where they failed miserably, whether it was to take back, or whether it was they were going to beat [us] in Congress.

We were going to lose 15 seats, supposedly; even the mainstream media was talking about how Pelosi was already the presumed leader, and it was just not a matter of if we were going to lose seats, it was how many seats we were going to lose.

And if you look at it, we’re right on the cusp of actually taking over the majority in Congress. We were for sure going to lose the Senate, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either. We have guaranteed 50, we have these run-offs in Georgia coming up in January, which would give us 52 if we’re successful there.

So across the board, they got completely annihilated and damn near lost the control of the House of Representatives. And if it wouldn’t have been for the fake news and the fake polls, where essentially for the last two years it was “Republicans of the House are going to be decimated, Republicans that are in the House are going to be decimated.” What that meant was—and you had polls that were coming out and showing it too, just like the infamous poll of showing Trump down 17 points in Wisconsin—so what was the practical effect of that? The practical effect and what they were trying to do was to cut off and suffocate the Republicans ability to raise money.

By cutting off our money, it really impacted our ability to go out and challenge in other races. We probably had another 10 to 20 really good candidates that we couldn’t even fund, because we had to fund the races that were the tightest, to defend our own incumbents, which we did, and also to take out half a dozen of their members. And even then, we got overspent, outspent, in some of these races by millions of dollars.

Just like the one race that still hasn’t been called yet; Incumbent Mike Garcia, Northern Los Angeles County. The Democrats were on broadcast television there, I think they spent something like $15 million in total or more going after one of our incumbents. So he got grossly outspent.

And this was the effect of their fake narrative that the news was continuing to not only perpetuate, but then backed up by what appears to be nothing other than suppression polls, suppression polling, and to send the message out to the American people, “Don’t give the Republicans or Trump any money because it’s just going to be throwing it down a rat hole. You might as well just give it to the Democrats or don’t give it all.” That’s what they successfully did during this election.

If that wouldn’t have happened over the last couple of months between suppressing our polls, censoring us on social media, and not to mention you have the issue of the news stories that were covered up, the obvious potential corruption of the Hunter Biden laptop. That was suppressed! That was covered up! If all of that, imagine if all of that wasn’t covered up. Just think of how much better we could have done in some Senate races, for example. I’ll name one: Minnesota; we had a great candidate, he didn’t lose by very much, but we didn’t have enough money to get in there and fund that candidate.

I mentioned that we probably had 20 additional House races that we could have played in. And then when you get down to the presidential level, it’s not just all of those issues that I just mentioned. It’s also the fact that you had this continued ongoing investigation into the Russia hoax that happened in the 2016 election, that the American people are still in the dark in, that the mainstream media was a part of. So imagine if all of that didn’t happen.

Not to mention what is potentially what we need to look at in terms of dead people voting, what we’re finding out now about Dominion and these computer companies; these are all issues that affected us before the election, during the election season, and then obviously right after the election. They had their narrative already ready to go. And Republicans just, we can’t stand for this. We have to ensure that we have integrity in our voting systems in this country.

Mr. Jekielek: I saw on one of your social feeds, on Parler actually, that you had shared commentary that Sidney Powell, one of the Trump team lawyers was mentioning, she says she has lots of evidence. At the same time, she was saying that some of her witnesses are being harassed or are fearing for their lives as if she’s having trouble collecting this information. What made you decide to choose to share that specific clip?

Rep. Nunes: I would say, first of all, I have a lot of respect for Sidney Powell because she was one that was willing to step up and get to the bottom of the General Flynn entrapment case. And so she’s a very strong, very smart attorney. And so I just can’t imagine that she’s out saying these things and making them up. She’s not somebody who makes things up. Everything she has said, at least in my experience with her, has come true. Now, as always, we’re going to have to wait; can she actually build the evidence to then present the case?

But if you look at everything around it, we’ll go back to what I said earlier, these are not people—meaning the Democratic Party—that are confident in their election. Biden should welcome recounts. This guy is limping into office, not going to have control of the Senate most likely, on the verge of losing the House. And why would you not want to get out there, and he should be siding with President Trump and saying, “I want to make sure that every vote was legal and that all this was aboveboard.” If not, you’re going to have people that aren’t going to accept that he’s a legitimate president.

And the irony of that is, is that the left, and the media, and the Democrats made up this whole Russia hoax that we’ve lived with for nearly five years, really, that somehow Vladimir Putin was really behind the presidency. That went on for five years, almost. And so for them to have never accepted the legitimacy of President Trump to now not want to get to the bottom and ensure that Biden is the legitimate president is, I think, a pretty telling sign.

I know that’s what I would do if I was in a close election, or any of my colleagues would do. None of us would want to come into office, thinking that we didn’t really win. That’s why if we have close elections, we support recounts, we ensure that Republicans and Democrats are monitoring the recounts, we ensure that everybody that voted is somebody that actually lived in the district and lived in the state, whatever it may be, and was actually a registered voter and didn’t vote any more than one time. Look at all the dead people that voted. Now, I’m not saying there were enough dead people that voted that turned the election, but somebody’s got to answer that.

Mr. Jekielek: So speaking of the Durham probe, you mentioned, of course the Russia collusion hoax and so forth. So there is this Durham probe that I think Representative Jim Jordan has said that he expects to see something in the near future. Those words have been said many times. There’s a lot of people who are doubting that anything will come of it or are worried that it might just kind of disappear in the future. Any thoughts on this? If anyone would know something, you might?

Rep. Nunes: I continue to have confidence in the Attorney General, and this long term career now, U.S. Attorney in the senior DOJ official, Durham. I can’t imagine that this is the way he’d want to end his career, so I continue to have confidence that they’re going to get this information out to the American public. And at that point, it’s hard for me to know if there will be, we have 14 criminal referrals that involve dozens and dozens of people, so the question is, will there be any more indictments than the one?

There for sure, should be a report. And then upon the release of that report, what I’ve kind of called for, that may be necessary even though I don’t like these, but we may need to appoint a special counsel based on that report, and it involves the [supposed] President-Elect Biden who’s even involved in some of this. He was there when Flynn was brought up on these bogus investigations involving the old provisions in law, the Logan Act, that had never even been used in 200 years.

So I continue to have confidence. I’m obviously disappointed this didn’t come out before the election. I think it should have but we are where we are now, and I’m hopeful that we’re going to see justice served in this matter involving the Russia hoax that the Democrats, and the Clinton campaign, and a bunch of dirty cops at DOJ and FBI, and other places, other agencies, perpetuated on the American people in the world.

This is stuff that happens in third world countries, what happened in 2016 and continues basically till today. And only one person’s paid the price, and that’s not going to be OK, moving forward. Between the Russia hoax and the situation with the election results, this doesn’t leave strong footing for the American people, at least for over 70 million Americans who want to see justice done on the Russia hoax, and they want to make sure that the election, that every vote is counted, and that they have some semblance of a free and fair election.

Mr. Jekielek: Speaking of the Logan Act, actually, there have been some reports that members of a prospective Biden administration have been talking with foreign leaders or foreign dignitaries.

Rep. Nunes: Right.

Mr. Jekielek: Any thoughts on that?

Rep. Nunes: It’s just the hypocrisy of it, right? It’s the hypocrisy that they’d be willing to continue to do this while accusing General Flynn of violating the Logan Act. And I want to make sure your audience knows, this is not a law that, if anybody was ever really prosecuted on it, would be upheld and be constitutional. It just never would be upheld.

And people, we now know from notes, that numerous senior officials, and DOJ, and FBI knew that. They knew that to be the case and that’s why it’s the irony of Biden being one of the ones that actually brought it up in the meeting. It’s rather frightening, quite frankly, that they were kind of searching through the laws that are on the books and said, “Oh, that one. We’ll use that one to go after and get Flynn,” because they had nothing on him. And it was preposterous to think that a three star general, former head of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], was a Russian agent.

But if you look at John Kerry, I don’t know if this is true, because it’s in the fake news, so I never trust what’s in the fake news, but supposedly, he was having discussions with the Iranian regime over the last four years. And now you have people bragging in the Biden team that are out bragging about talking to foreign dignitaries. So it’s just the same old thing; whatever they accuse you of doing, they’re doing. They know there was never anything wrong with it.

I’m not saying there was nothing wrong with John Kerry talking to the Iranian regime. In terms of nothing legally wrong. I think it’s unethical and stupid. And there’s nothing wrong with people that are on Biden’s team talking to foreign leadership. That’s all common. But the fact that they’re not dropping this case against General Flynn is a national nightmare.

Mr. Jekielek: So let’s talk about harassment. We are already talking about that a little bit. Sidney Powell is saying some of her potential witnesses are being harassed, threatened. In Michigan, we have the Wayne County, two members of the Wayne County Board of Elections, I think one is the chairperson, they’re basically rescinding their certification of their votes for Wayne County because they say they were essentially threatened; they were bullied into doing it. Wow! What are your thoughts?

Rep. Nunes: I’ve seen that for the last four years myself. I’ve lived through that with my family, my staff, my extended family, anybody I’ve ever worked with. So this is what the radical left does. They do things like this. So I saw that in Michigan. It looks like in the middle of the night, they were being doxxed, they were being threatened. And so we need to get to the bottom of this too. They’ve now rescinded that.

I would think, once again, that the people of Michigan would want to make sure they have a free and fair election, and what I understand is, there’s numerous issues in terms of matching up the counts and precincts throughout Wayne County. So why not just get to the bottom of it and figure it out? They’re acting like people that have something to hide from my perspective.

Mr. Jekielek: What is your message to people out there who may have some information related to irregularities, related to fraud, something concerning the election, but feel threatened? They see what could happen.

Rep. Nunes: [It] all depends on what they have and if they were in a position to actually see the fraud. So the RNC, Republican National Committee, has a hotline set up and I would encourage people that, especially if it’s first hand knowledge or they had eyes on nefarious activity, they should come forward, and there’s ways to come forward that you can protect your identity. Most Americans, I think, will step up and do that because they know that our entire election system is on the verge of collapse here.

Mr. Jekielek: At The Epoch Times, we’re also collecting any information or leads related to this. You can actually write to the American Thought Leaders account. It’s at [email protected].

Rep. Nunes: So you’re actually trying to do real investigative work, and you’re actually out looking for sources.

Mr. Jekielek: We are.

Rep. Nunes: Amazing. The rest of the media doesn’t seem to be too interested in that.

Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the media playing an outsized role in the election, I guess. I think that’s what you said, that the election, the media in general—

Rep. Nunes: Yes. What I’ve said on numerous occasions is that if you don’t understand that the media is part of the Democratic Party and part of the radical left movement, you shouldn’t be in politics. I continue to try to work with my colleagues, Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate, and Republicans across the country.

Every speech I give, every talk in every group that I’m with, I tell them, “You don’t meet with these people. You do not talk to them. These are not people that are trying to get to the truth.” I can’t stress that enough. I have even said this on numerous occasions to the White House and to the President. We should not be talking to these people.

I think it was over the last four years, there were a lot of good journalists out there, investigative journalists, who didn’t get access to the White House and probably don’t sometimes get access to members of Congress. And so we have to reprioritize within the Republican Party that one of the mainstays here has to be that you have to understand that if you’re talking to these journalists, you’re putting not just yourself in danger, you’re likely being used to do harm to other Republicans in Congress and the party agenda. It’s just something that I can talk about this ad nauseam but trying to get them to understand this is a difficult job, and I’ve been trying to do the same thing with social media.

One of the biggest challenges that we have right now is we can’t win this battle for ideas without any communication system. You don’t go to war without communications and logistics. You can’t win a war without being able to communicate, and so you have over 90 percent of the media against us. Basically, every large media company is against the Republican Party and conservatives.

In addition to that, the funnel that I’ve described, meaning the social media companies, all of this gets jammed through a funnel and that’s what we’re seeing on our phones every day. It’s poisoning the American people, and we got to witness it up close and personal during the 30 days leading up to the campaign—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, they were all censoring what we see.

I actually think it’s so much worse than people imagine, and that includes even myself. What the social media companies are doing, and believe me, and I’m one of the ones who thinks they’re doing a lot—really, really bad. A lot of censoring, a lot of ability, people just disappear when you try to use a search engine. They’ve made the entire people disappear. You can’t find stories on people, whether it’s on YouTube, or Instagram, or what have you.

So the damage here that’s being done is enormous because we have no effective way to communicate. But the bigger problem is making sure that Republicans, not only that are elected and running for office, or who might think about running for office, but also conservatives across the country need to know, if you’re using those platforms, you, or your family members, or your friends, or neighbors, you’re being poisoned with left-wing garbage on a daily basis, and our ideas are being blacked out as if we never make them.

I can give you great examples of that but probably the best example is just the followers that I’ve picked up on Parler, which is a replacement for Instagram and Twitter. It’s like all of a sudden, people know they can find me, and they can follow, and they can see what I have to say multiple times a day. They know what I’m communicating out there. It didn’t happen before if you were just following me on Facebook and the other usual platforms.

Rep. Nunes: The other big one that we’ve now noticed, quite alarming, is YouTube. I knew I was being censored on YouTube, so I switched over to Rumble, which is a YouTube alternative, and all of a sudden, I’m going from a few thousand views that I was getting on YouTube—and you can’t even find me on YouTube, at least the last time I checked, you go in there and search, and all you’re going to see is negative, hateful fake news stories mostly about me—now on Rumble, I’m getting tens of thousands of views on my posts.

How does that happen? I’ve only been on Rumble for three months. In four years, four years, I’ve 9000 subscribers on YouTube. Today, on Rumble, I think I’m close to 250,000 subscribers in the matter of the last three months. How’s that possible? YouTube has hundreds of millions of users around the world. How is it possible?

I don’t need to see an algorithm, I don’t need to see anything to know that our ideas are being censored by these big tech companies. And the sooner that my colleagues recognize that, and conservatives around the country, and even neutral moderate people, have to understand that they need to be able to go to a place to actually hear both sides. You don’t get that if you’re using Google, watching YouTube, if you’re on Facebook and Instagram, it’s not going to get it.

Mr. Jekielek: The big question and this is what concerns me—there’s a couple of things I want to cover because this topic is so, so important. At The Epoch Times, for example, or any other media that wants to tell both sides of the story or at least allow people to make up their own minds about what we’re reporting on, if you go into Parler, for example, it’s a predominantly conservative platform right now. That’s part of the reason why you’re advocating for people go there, but how do you talk to people more broadly? So I think this is the challenge.

Rep. Nunes: Parler is not a conservative platform. It’s just a platform that doesn’t censor people. So anybody is free to go to Parler. Anybody’s free to go to Rumble. It just so happens, those are the only places as conservatives that we can go to, but everybody else is welcome to go there. They’re not going to start censoring. The Communist Party could go there, and they could start their own accounts on Parler. Nobody’s stopping them. But they prefer to be able to hide under fake, “Oh, free speech at Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter, and these places,” and it’s not. Just simply not.

I stumbled into Rumble because I knew I was being censored on YouTube. I was the first political person that was on Rumble. Nobody ever thought to go there, but I just realized, nobody’s able to find my podcasts or my newscasts on YouTube. What am I going to do? So I found Rumble. They didn’t find me, so it’s not that it’s a conservative platform. It’s a platform that allows you to put up your content where people can go and actually see it. So if you type in “Devin Nunes” on Rumble, you’ll find my content.

Mr. Jekielek: To finish up, I’m going to read you a few things I read today which I found concerning. One of them is a post from a DNC [Democratic National Committee] member from California. He says, “Seriously, how do you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox, Facebook? We have to start thinking in terms of post-World War II Germany or Japan, or the failures of reconstruction in the south.” That’s one comment. Another comment by no other than former President Obama, he says that social media is the single biggest threat to our democracy today. This is obviously the other perspective here. What are your thoughts?

Rep. Nunes: It’s not surprising. I wrote about it in “Countdown to Socialism” that this is where they were headed. You also don’t mention that many famous people or well-known people within the Democratic Party apparatus have also been talking about creating lists, and anybody that has ever worked for President Trump or was associated at all, you should be banned from doing anything.

So I assume what their meaning is, that’s a signal to big corporations that people shouldn’t be hired [if they] are part of the Trump administration. This is what happens in Communist China, this is what happens in socialist countries, or you have totalitarian states like Venezuela, Russia. So we’ve seen it throughout history and those types of comments ought to scare the living hell out of people. And I think the more that it’s promoted, so people understand that quote that you just read. I don’t know who that person is but those are alarming thoughts for one to have.

And then as it relates to the Obama question, he started this back in 2016 because back in 2016, the Trump campaign successfully used Facebook to communicate to millions of Americans. Because if you remember, they were on a shoestring budget, President Trump was just flying around and he was putting everything on Facebook, and so Obama went to Zuckerberg at the close of 2016 [and] says, “This has got to stop.”

So when he says that social media is a threat to democracy, what he’s really saying [to] Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, “You better listen to me,” because he’s actually the one that’s controlling Biden right now. All of his people are controlling Biden. This is a former president who didn’t leave the swamp. It’s very odd. He has a fancy home just half a mile from the White House here.

So this is somebody who wants to have control of the party. I think he didn’t like Clinton and figures that Clinton botched the last election. But Biden, the first candidate ever to run a campaign from a basement, to never be asked any difficult questions by the media on almost any subject, but most importantly, the subject that is on the mind of those 70 million people like, “What was your involvement in the Russia hoax? Why did you continue to claim that Trump and Republicans were under the control of Vladimir Putin?” This is their candidate for president. This is the guy who they think is going to be the next president.

When Obama talks about big tech and that they’re a threat to democracy, it’s because he knows that the Democratic Party is controlling them, and he’s sending a message to them to continue to do what they’re doing, and put their boot on the neck of any free thought of the American people, and only put in the thought, the poison, of the hard left. That’s what’s happening.

Mr. Jekielek: Very strong words. Any final thoughts before we finish up?

Rep. Nunes: We’ll just continue to, the thing that I’m continuing to do—a lot of people ask, “What are we doing?” One of the goals that I see is that we have to get our communications architecture back up and running. Or we’ll have no chance in this fight for the battle of ideas and the policies of this country. And that’s why I’m urging people to get to the free spots, the places that are still free for thought and the spread of ideas on the web.

And of course, I’ve already mentioned in this interview how to deal with the media. It’s of utmost importance. The longer we wait, we’ve already waited too long. I warned about it in the book; I wrote, I warned the White House, I’ve warned my Republican colleagues. I’m not trying to play Monday morning quarterback here, but this is urgent. You cannot win a battle for ideas without having an ability to communicate.

I hear a lot of a lot of complaints from my supporters and people that call my office, saying, “Well, what are you guys, what are Republicans doing?” All my colleagues and I, everyday we’re trying to get to the bottom of what’s the evidence. We’re trying to make sure that we get resources to Georgia to win those Senate races.

But I also tell them look, the most important thing we can do—we are saying these things; we’re out there talking about it, but you’re not seeing it because it’s being covered up by the fake news media and the social media companies. You don’t see what we’re saying. So that’s why I appreciate the opportunity to be on your show, because at least I know you’re not going to censor me, and you’re going to put it up on Rumble so people can actually see it.

Mr. Jekielek: Congressman Devin Nunes, such a pleasure to have you on again.

Rep. Nunes: Thank you so much.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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