Nunes claims there’s no evidence Papadopoulos ever met Trump despite photo

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in a Monday morning interview said there is no evidence former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos met with President Trump, despite a widely disseminated photo of the two sitting around the same table for a meeting.

“If Papadopoulos was such a major figure, you had nothing on him, you know, the guy lied,” Nunes told “Fox & Friends.” “As far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who — never even had met with the president.”

{mosads}

Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, is included in a photo that shows then-candidate Trump and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) sitting at opposite heads of a table.

Nunes’s comment comes after the House Intelligence Committee last week released a controversial memo that accuses the Justice Department of abusing its surveillance powers. That memo names Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI, as the individual who “triggered” the FBI’s opening of a counterintelligence probe in July of 2016.

“Look, getting drunk in London and talking to diplomats, saying that you don’t like Hillary Clinton — I think it’s kind of scary that our intelligence agencies would take that and use it against [an] American citizen,” Nunes added during his interview with “Fox & Friends.”

The memo, drafted by Nunes’s staff, has been the subject of partisan fighting within both the House Intelligence Committee and throughout Congress.