One of the catalysts for starting the Trump-Russia probe was former Trump advisor George Papadopolous’s conversation with an Austrailian diplomat.

Now, GOP Rep. John Ratcliffe is saying that the FBI has evidence that directly refutes that story, and actually exonerates the convicted former Trump aide.

This means that the whole premise for starting the Russia investigation is flawed.

According to The Daily Caller:

Ratcliffe noted that the FBI opened its investigation on July 31, 2016, after receiving information from the Australian government about a conversation that Papadopoulos had on May 10, 2016, with Alexander Downer, the top Australian diplomat to the U.K.

…

But Ratcliffe, a top member of the House Judiciary Committee, suggested on Sunday that the FBI and Justice Department had information that contradicted its intelligence on Papadopoulos.

“Hypothetically, if the Department of Justice and the FBI have another piece of evidence that directly refutes that, that directly contradicts that, what you would expect is for the Department of Justice to present both sides of the coin to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to evaluate the weight and sufficiency of that evidence,” Ratcliffe said.

“Instead, what happened here was Department of Justice and FBI officials in the Obama administration in October of 2016 only presented to the court the evidence that made the government’s case to get a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign associate,” he added.

This information comes after it was revealed that the FBI used the suspect anti-Trump dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on another Trump campaign aide, Carter Page.