Reminder: The Guy Killing the HPSCI Investigation Was Part of Trump’s Troubled Transition Team
Over the weekend, the WaPo had an article on all the things Devin Nunes is doing to kill the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Trump’s cooperation with Russia during the election. It started like this:
Rep. Devin Nunes, once sidelined by an ethics inquiry from leading the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe, is reasserting the full authority of his position as chairman just as the GOP appears poised to challenge special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
The California Republican was cleared in December of allegations he improperly disclosed classified information while accusing the Obama administration of exposing the identities of Trump affiliates on surveillance reports. Since clearing his name, Nunes has stepped up his attacks on Mueller’s team and the law enforcement agencies around it, including convening a group of Intelligence Committee Republicans to draft a likely report on “corruption” among the investigators working for the special counsel.
And ended like this:
Nunes, meanwhile, appears to have made up his mind about the House Intelligence Committee probe into the allegations surrounding Trump and Russia, expressing his convictions in an interview with Fox News.
“We have no evidence of Russia collusion between the Trump campaign” and Russia, Nunes said.
I’ll save you the click and answer the question you should be asking: did this 1400 word article on Nunes’ attempts to kill his committee’s investigation make any mention of the fact that Nunes served on Trump’s Transition Team?
The answer, as it so routinely has been when people treat Nunes’ opinion about whether there was “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia as a credible opinion, is no. No, the WaPo didn’t think it relevant to mention that Nunes was a key figure in the transition process that has since become a close focus of the Mueller investigation. Indeed, Nunes was involved in both efforts to shield members of Congress and Transition officials when they do Bibi Netanyahu’s bidding. And if he didn’t use his Congressional email address during the transition (in which case Mueller would probably give it great deference), he might well be among the 13 officials whose emails Mueller’s team obtained from GSA, which has been the latest panic that Nunes has fed.
In short, Nunes was in the thick of things, and he should no more be treated as a credible judge of whether there was collusion going on in the casino than Mike Flynn Jr or Don Jr or Trump himself. While I don’t imagine Nunes is in any legal difficulty, he was nevertheless part of efforts to hijack US policy before Trump became President and some of his obstruction since then has served to distract attention that the Transition Team did so.
And it’s not just WaPo’s news page that seems to have ignored this detail. So has Greg Sargent, in a piece assessing the likelihood HPSCI Democrats would do their own report laying out all the ways Nunes obstructed a legitimate inquiry. You’d think you’d point those two points together: that Nunes obstructed the inquiry because he’s tangentially a subject of it.
This should be a really basic thing: Nunes may have been cleared of leaking. But he is still making key decisions on an investigation into actions targeting an organization he participated in. Naming HPSCI Chair Nunes to his Transition Team might be the most competent aspect of Trump’s cover-up, by far.
That’s the story here.
Indeed. Being cleared by friendly peers is not the same as being cleared. Nor does it alleviate the obvious conflicts of interest you allude to. As you say, he isn’t disinterested: he’s blindingly implicated, with access to data he must be delivering up to Trump as and when needed.
And yet the WaPo essentially gives him a free pass. Standard operating procedure for press coverage of the Trump retinue. Thank goodness for Emptywheel and her not drinking the Beltway cool-aid.
Maybe I’m too thick, but ‘name cleared’ of what? As I understand…
1. Nunes holds a presser – a Joe McCarthy special: highly manipulated & contrived to give off the general impression of being impromptu & to leave behind messages of fear, panic, gravity, the speaker’s central importance & vitality, in that the speaker – whose office, again, has set this thing up this way – is at the exact epicenter of a desperate nation’s panicked media crush seeking to obtain from He Who Knows All some sign of … ? (hope? doom?)
2. At his presser, with its contrived impression of a media crush, Nunes ladles out, to the very same media in attendance that are critical to the manipulation, a marbles-banging mash-up of substantially incoherent loosely connected (if at all) paranoia-filled speculations, framed to give off the message that, for national security reasons (He’s THAT important.), he’s carefully deliberately salted his otherwise inexplicable incomprehensible mess, with Easter egg, that, IF interpreted correctly (and only Fox had invested in the necessary decoder.), put Nunes & Trump sweaty hind-cheek to sweaty hind-cheek in standing athwart WDC to save America from radical Obamanation.
3. Tho strictly speaking, what comes out of his mouth are a bunch of names strewn about like confetti at a festival of drunks – which any reporters present who might wish to can identify with whatever part of the more or less concurrently spewn paranoia-filled images they choose.
4. Presumably it’s actually the COMPLAINT, framed, as it must be, with some degree of coherency, that makes the last big contribution to this pretentious inverse name-cleared meme, because by no more than it’s very coherency, it set up a standard which the presser performance was pre-designed to dissolve before.
That is, the complaint process was fated from the start to issue a null finding. The fact that otherwise generally conscientious reporters & columnists at WaPo now ‘neglect’ to raise this reality, and even more so the simpler far more clear and direct fact that Nunes was on the transition team, means the capture process is working fine.
From Demirjian’s 31 Dec 17 article in the WaPo:
The House Committee on Ethics [sic], evenly split between Dems and the GOP, “cleared” Nunes.
Word up.
The whole Nunes “clearance” process a) was bullshit and b) seems like a bellwether of the impending Republican shit show on the house side, particularly given his direct participation in the Trump transition (which none of the politicians involved have forgotten). I say “seems” because I’ve been unable to grind through the obviously depressing details of the process. Suffice to say, the Trump-submissive contingent on the R side is larger than estimated and closes ranks in the end.
Now that Nunes is back in force, it’s abundantly clear that his job was to use the HPSCI to run interference. He’s very much Trump’s guy in all of this (because, of course). That seems kind of downbeat, but I’m actually modestly encouraged that Nunes was taken out of the picture for quite some time, and that the HPSCI process went as far as it did. Since when did anyone expect it to break real ground? If anything, it has over-performed. Of course, the R side is shifting back to the original “Nothing To See Here People Commission” mandate, but haven’t the D side actually found some real footing? At the least, they’re convincingly arguing that the process is a sham.
Given Nunes'”spy vs. spy” antics, far more pro-active than merely stalling an investigation, could Mueller eventually name Nunes as a co-conspirator (indicted or not) in the cover-up/obstruction of justice? And if Democrats have gained control of the House by then, if he’s un-indicted, can they expel him? I guess it’s more likely Nunes will suddenly feel a burning need to spend more time with his family.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d guess that leaking grand jury or committee testimony to the person(s) being investigated might be considered some kind of violation.
It is a Rule 6(e) violation for grand jurors, prosecutors, etc to leak GJ information. But witnesses and their lawyers are free to talk about their testimony and questioning. Tunes should not have any direct GJ information, and I doubt he does. The committees do have their own information from their investigations though.
IC Portfolios. Not buying.
Nothing will prevent a new ‘program’ from being created that never becomes part of a portfolio.
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2018/01/ic-portfolios/
Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats, who has kept a comparatively low public profile lately, surfaced last month to issue new guidance that is intended in part as a way to curb internal IC secrecy.
The guidance discusses the creation and management of intelligence “portfolios.” This term refers to a collection of classified programs that overlap in some way and that are bundled together to facilitate information sharing and collaboration.
[They all overlap]
“Establishment of a Portfolio may be required in order to achieve unity of effort and effect against the highest priority requirements or when compartmentalization hinders or prevents access to information necessary for intelligence integration,” according to the new guidance. The practice has no bearing on public disclosure of intelligence information.
[The intent is good, but bad guys in IC will continue to hide. Spy vs Spy]
A great tweet that all inside beltway need to absorb. And those outside the beltway too.
https://mobile.twitter.com/MalwareJake/status/937370245215539201
‘Want to be great at infosec (and life)? Get out of your echo chamber. Take time every day to educate yourself on arguments that challenge your worldview (personally and professionally). Understanding how those who disagree with you think is absolutely invaluable.”
Maybe I’m just too thick to make the connection but it seems like you’ve just dropped your daily collection of random factoids in the comments again.
Others on HPSCI need to think outside the box. They need not let Nunes lead them astray.
Nunes needs to listen to them.
For a guy who golfs while claiming to be at work, I suppose we should be happy that something about Trump actually “works”. He is, after all, a public employee.
But I find that the attribute most bragged about is usually the one that falls flat when needed. Here’s hoping that’s true of Trump’s button.
I’d like to think that this is why Rosenstein and Wray had a little sit-down with Paul Ryan today, that went something like this . . .
Oh, to be a fly on the wall.
(Several internal links in The Hill omitted here)