Steve King Brawls With Chris Cuomo Over Nunes Memo: ‘Earth-Shaking…Deeper Than Watergate!’

One of the loudest GOP House members when it’s come to the whole #ReleaseTheMemo movement showed up tonight on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time to discuss the controversial Nunes memo. And, yep, things got pretty heated.

Anchor Chris Cuomo immediately began pressing Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on his confidence in the memo, especially in light of the FBI expressing “grave concerns” over the document’s accuracy and reports that House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes hasn’t even seen the FISA application or fact basis that his document purportedly provides conclusions on.

“How do you judge it when you haven’t seen it?” Cuomo asked King after the congressman brushed aside a question on the FISA application.

“We are going to have to pull all of this out, and that’s one of the things the memo does,” the Iowa lawmaker responded, leading Cuomo to shoot back that King was “already concluding it was wrong.”

“I know what’s wrong,” King confidently noted.

After that, the conservative congressman went on to state that he wanted the data to come out before making the case that this was part of Congress’ need to provide oversight of the FBI and DOJ. This then led to this absolutely gobsmacking remark:

“Then what I saw and I believe happened could go on in perpetuity, and we become a banana republic. This is earth-shaking, and it does go deeper than Watergate!”

“Deeper than Watergate?!” Cuomo incredulously asked. “How is it deeper than Watergate?!”

And from there, the two just went at it. Cuomo would go on and note that this “pattern to jumping for a conclusion” from certain Republicans is a “beautiful distraction from” the Russia probe. Meanwhile, King claimed they were just trying to connect the dots and if they failed to do so, history would look at them as “naive and foolish.”

Check out the tense exchange above, via CNN.

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Justin Baragona on Twitter: @justinbaragona

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