Darkness at Nunes

Devin Nunes, Memogate and the ghost of Michael Flynn

watching the devin nunes memo blow

up like a trick cigar in early February, Andrew Janz calls himself “probably the happiest man in the country.”

An assistant district attorney vying to oust Nunes from his California congressional seat, Janz says his campaign war chest has more than tripled since Nunes announced he was releasing highly edited, top-secret information to discredit the FBI and Justice Department’s investigation into “Russiagate.” That’s not saying much: The Democrat’s $240,000 purse would hardly cover the cost of robocalls in today’s congressional elections, where winning candidates spend an average of $1.3 million—and Nunes already has three times that figure. And while there have been some signs that the incumbent’s grip is slipping—a January poll commissioned by Janz showed Nunes leading a re-election bid by only 5 percent against a generic Democratic opponent—his release of the documents has proved popular among Republicans.

Still, Janz says, “I’m feeling great, man. You’ve seen the memo. I think there’s going to be plenty for folks on the Democratic side, and even some folks on the Senate Republican side, to poke holes in.”

Which is what they did. “The Nunes Memo fizzled and failed,” tweeted former Nixon White House counsel and Watergate witness John Dean, in a representative view. “The only thing it established is that Nunes is a nut job, and he has released anew the putrid stench of neo-mccarthyism.”

“Nut job” has clung to Nunes’s reputation as long as he’s been chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI, in Washington-speak). Or at least among Democrats (and some Republicans), who have decried Nunes’s transformation of a once-bipartisan national security panel into a GOP platform to attack Democrats.

Janz thinks he knows why: Nunes’s mentorship by Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the now-disgraced former Trump national security adviser. “I know that they had a pretty close relationship,” he says. Nunes served on the executive committee of the Trump transition team with Flynn, he notes, which Vice President Mike Pence headed, “and it seems to me like he never left.”