CURTAINS ON NUNES CHARADE
Now it’s up to the Senate and the Justice Department to get to the bottom of Russiagate
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes seemed mystified last week when reporters asked whether he’d continue to oversee the panel’s investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government. “Why would I not?” he answered. It was a reasonable question. The California Republican moved so quickly from liability to laughingstock, and so thoroughly destroyed his committee’s credibility, that nothing he does can redeem it. Not even stepping aside from the Russia probe, as he did Thursday, while the Office of Government Ethics and the House Ethics Committee investigate complaints about his actions.
Nunes took two Nancy Drewlike outings to the White House — the first to see surveillance data suggesting that U.S. intelligence agencies had incidentally ( but lawfully) intercepted communications involving the Trump transition team, and the second to share what he had learned with Trump himself.
At best they revealed the intelligence chair as a shameless shill for the targets of his committee’s investigation. At worst, they suggested a level of incompetence unusual even in that citadel of cluelessness known as the U.S. House of Representatives. WHERE DUTY LIES Nunes insisted he had “a duty” to share the new evidence with Trump even before alerting his fellow committee members. The explanation for his inexplicable behavior still sounds as idiotic as it did the day he first made it.
Nearly everything Nunes has done since seems transparently calculated to take the heat off his party’s embattled president. That includes canceling a public hearing in which his committee was scheduled to hear testimony from former national intelligence director James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan and former acting attorney general Sally Yates, then teasing possible appearances by ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and first son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The charade is over, but the panel’s credibility as a fact-finder is toast. Any hope of redeeming the legislative branch’s independence now resides with the Senate Intelligence Committee, where Sen. Richard Burr, the GOP chair from North Carolina, and Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat from Virginia, are in the early stages of their investigation.
But the best opportunity to get to the bottom of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia still lies in the Justice Department, where career prosecutor Rod Rosenstein awaits Senate confirmation as Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ top deputy.
President George W. Bush appointed Rosenstein to be Maryland’s top prosecutor in 2005, and President Obama retained him. No one seems to doubt his integrity, and he’s likely to be confirmed easily. Sessions has already recused himself from any role in the Justice investigation of the Trump-Russia nexus, which means Rosenstein will be the ultimate decider on all matters related to the probe. WATERGATE REVISITED His plight is roughly analogous to Elliot Richardson’s when the Senate confirmed him as attorney general in the early stages of the Watergate scandal.
Like Rosenstein, Richardson inherited a red-hot investigation from an attorney general already tainted by the underlying scandal. Richardson won Senate confirmation by promising to appoint an independent prosecutor. His subsequent decision to resign rather than violate his promise to protect the independ- ence of that special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, might have been the pivotal moment in the twoyear marathon that led to President Nixon’s resignation.
Nixon won the battle to fire Cox, but Cox’s successor continued to press for access to the Oval Office tape recordings that would incriminate Nixon. The Supreme Court’s ruling that Nixon was required to relinquish the tapes to the Justice Department sealed his doom.
You needn’t be a savant to foresee that any satisfactory resolution of the Trump-Russian scandal — any investigative conclusion that can command the confidence of Trump’s defenders and accusers alike — will likely hinge on Rosenstein’s credibility.
If Rosenstein can assert his independence and protect the investigation from White House efforts to limit its scope or manipulate its results, he could reap the gratitude Richardson received for his principled conduct in the Watergate scandal.
If Rosenstein falters, public confidence in the Justice Department is likely to go the way of public confidence in Devin Nunes and his West Wing puppeteers.