Devin Nunes’ Fiasco

Editor,

Representative Devin Nunes served on the Trump campaign staff and has shown his undying and unrelenting loyalty to the man ever since. For his campaign involvement, Nunes was supposed to recuse himself from the House Intelligence Committee investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. For his questionable activities since, he was brought before the House Ethics Committee and eventually cleared of any punishable offense. However, Nunes should still have recused himself from the investigation, which he did not. Instead, Devin Nunes accelerated his attacks on the integrity of our intelligence agencies which includes his new “secret” memo just released.

For those readers who get their information from Fox & Friends and Sean Hannity, there really was Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election and there will be in the future. We should be working on a bipartisan plan to limit Russian interference in the future and to protect our democracy rather than attacking our intelligence agencies whose mission is to do exactly that. Efforts by President Trump and Devin Nunes to distract from, and discredit, the Mueller Investigation and the real issues, are giving Vladimir Putin something to be proud of. He has two top Republican government officials discrediting our top law enforcement agencies and sowing distrust among our citizens. This is exactly what Putin’s international strategy is towards, all democratic-leaning governments. Trump and Nunes have done our democracy a great disservice with their attacks on our top law enforcement agencies.

Nunes’ memo has turned out to be a gigantic bust. All of Fox News’ sensationalized promotion of the memo has been defused by a single line included in the memo. The counterintelligence investigation was initiated, not by the Steele dossier, but by the Australian government informing the FBI of Papadopoulos’ conversations with a Russian professor about possible dirt on Hillary Clinton. And three separate individuals had signed off on the FISA warrant prior to the Page warrant being signed by Rosenstein. Did no one proofread this memo?

What’s your next conspiracy theory and move Devin? Why not ask Putin what you should try next? Todd Pixler Porterville