“Those who try to enter illegally should be rescued at sea and sent back where they came from.”
Nunes, meanwhile, was defending Flynn and Trump on another matter: the national security adviser’s secret conversations with Kislyak. Had the president-elect approved those talks, and did they include promises to reverse the Obama administration’s punishment of the Kremlin for its interference in the 2016 election? In an unusually partisan step, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who was supposed to be leading an investigation into Russian subversion and Team Trump, anointed himself one of the administration’s leading defenders. Trump and Flynn, he opined, were “so busy” that they wouldn’t have had time to discuss talking to Kislyak.
A Washington Post headline called Nunes’s explanation “strange,” and the paper printed it in full: “No, look, I think this whole issue with General Flynn—general Flynn is an American war hero, one of the—put together one of the greatest military machines in our history providing the intelligence to basically eliminate al-qaeda from Iraq. And he was the national security adviser designee, he was taking multiple calls a day from ambassadors, from foreign leaders, and look, I know this because the foreign leaders were contacting me trying to get in touch with the transition team and folks that wanted to meet with President Trump or—president-elect Trump and Vice President–elect Pence.”
Nunes could not rescue Flynn from disgrace—or, later, from Mueller, with whom the former national security adviser negotiated a guilty plea on a charge of lying to the FBI.
But Nunes’s efforts to distract attention from Russiagate didn’t cease with Flynn’s departure from the administration a year ago. And even his now-famous “midnight run” to the White House weeks later indirectly involved Flynn. According to multiple reports, Ezra Cohen-watnick, whom Flynn put in charge of intelligence matters on the White House National Security Council despite his scant, low-level experience at the DIA, helped provide Nunes with classified documents that the congressman claimed to show— falsely, as it turned out—that Obama had “wiretapped Trump Tower.” That stunt prompted complaints from good-government groups that Nunes had improperly obtained and publicized classified information.
When the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation, Nunes stepped down from his panel’s slow-moving investigation into Kremlin election interference. Temporarily. And on the sidelines, critics noted, Nunes was continuing his campaign to deflect questions about Team Trump’s contacts with the Russians, which climaxed with the memo to discredit the Justice Department’s probe. That was just Nunes’s first step, Axios reported. The chairman is preparing as many as five more reports on politically motivated “wrongdoing” at those
The Democrat’s $240,000 purse would hardly cover the cost of robocalls in today’s congressional elections.
“I talk to Flynn virtually every day, if not multiple times a day.”
agencies, as well as the State Department. In the meantime, his campaign was unmasked as the force behind The California Republican, which purports to be a general news site but has featured headlines such as “CNN busted for peddling fake news AGAIN!”
Longtime observers of congressional oversight called such activism on behalf of an administration unprecedented. Partisanship has waxed and waned over the years at HPSCI, depending on who held the gavel, says former senior CIA official Larry Pfeiffer, but “we saw nothing compared with what we are seeing with Chairman Nunes,” he says. “I don’t envy our successors at Langley. We didn’t call HPSCI ‘the Island of Misfit Toys’ for nothing!”
Nunes, says David Barrett, an authority on Congress and the spy agencies, has added to the partisan rancor on the Hill instead of isolat- ing the committee from it. HPSCI needs to gain the trust of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to admit their mistakes. When the intelligence committees become political, he told The New York Times, oversight of the intelligence agencies becomes “just about impossible.”
“None has ever been so partisan as the current HPSCI chair,” Loch Johnson, a leading intelligence historian at the University of Georgia, says. “Worst yet, Mr. Nunes has become Capitol Hill’s cheerleader in chief for the Trump administration on anything dealing with intelligence.”
But is there a point when such par- tisanship moves beyond cheerleading into obstruction of justice, as some anti-trump experts have argued? Nothing prevents the feds from looking into it, says Edward Loya, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section. “The DOJ and FBI can initiate an obstruction of justice charge against anyone, including Congressman Nunes,” he says. But “it would be highly inappropriate for special counsel Mueller to conduct an obstruction investigation about whether Nunes is obstructing Mueller’s own investigation.
The more appropriate course,” says Loya, now in private practice with Epstein Becker Green in Washington, “would be for the DOJ to appoint a different special counsel to review this matter.”
Nunes would no doubt denounce such a move as “political.” And he might get some traction with the charge, considering that more than seven out of 10 Republicans polled after his memo’s release said they believed “members of the FBI and Department of Justice are working to delegitimize Trump through politically motivated investigations.”
Back in the Central Valley, Janz says he’s ready to combat Nunes on Russiagate if he gets the nomination. After all, he says, some of the Trump administration’s own officials have been saying that the Russians are already meddling in this fall’s midterm elections. He plans to criticize Nunes on why he’s not focusing on that instead of undermining the federal probe into Kremlin subversion.
“The best we can do is speak factually about what is going on,” he says. “All Americans should be alarmed. People in this district are asking why Nunes is going to such great lengths to cover for Trump. There must be some motivation behind what he is doing.”