House Republicans have found evidence that Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team may have misled the courts and Congress and are considering making criminal referrals asking the Justice Department to investigate those prosecutors, a key lawmaker says.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Just the News that his team has been scouring recent documents released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s, and found glaring evidence that contradicts claims the Mueller team made to courts and Congress.

"We're now going through these 302s, and we're going to be making criminal referrals on the Mueller dossier team, the people that put this Mueller report together," Nunes said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast set to air on Tuesday.

Nunes specifically reacted to a story in Just the News disclosing that FBI interview memos of key figure George Papadopoulos show he was helpful in trying to locate a witness named Joseph Mifsud but that Mueller's prosecutors portrayed Papdopoulos as trying to thwart or frustrate the investigation's efforts to question Mifsud.

The new FBI memos provide "our first evidence of the Mueller team lying to the court. It a lie. It's a total lie," the lawmaker said, referring to the Mueller team's claim that Papadopoulos tried to hinder efforts to locate and question Mifsud.

"I always assumed that Papadopolis probably was helpful. I mean, he's kind of alluded to that, that he offered to be helpful, but we had never seen the actual 302s," Nunes said.

You can listen to the Nunes interview here.

Audio file

Nunes remains the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and is widely credited for exposing evidence that the FBI submitted false and misleading surveillance warrant applications targeting the Trump campaign in the Russia case.

He previously made eight criminal referrals last year against witnesses he believed were less than forthcoming during his committee's investigation. But Nunes' next referrals would be the first to target the Mueller team, and could force the Justice Department to investigate the special counsel team's members or review the accuracy of Mueller's final report.

Nunes said he hopes John Durham, the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut named by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the Russia investigators, can turn his attention to the conduct of Mueller's team and not just the FBI leaders who started the Russia probe using opposition research from Hillary Clinton's campaign. He said one unanswered question remains when the FBI realized they were investigating Trump using Clinton-paid research.

"The only question that we don't know is at what point did the Clinton dirty operation merge with the FBI?" he said. "And it's something only Durham can get to the bottom of.

You can read the Papadopoulos memos here:

You can watch Devin Nunes speak here at the House Intelligence Committee hearing on the Mueller report.