Ex-HPSCI member* bemoans the current committee

*Correction: Paul Pillar describes himself as an ex-intelligence officer. Sorry for the error.

An important ingredient in building a cooperative relationship has been the committees’ record in protecting classified information, which up to now has been good.

In subsequent years the intensified partisanship that has infected everything else in Congress, especially since the Gingrich revolution in the 1990s, has affected both intelligence committees as well. In recent times the infection has been worse in HPSCI than in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Most recently the problems in HPSCI have centered on the activities of committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA). Nunes once recused himself from anything having to do with investigations into Russia’s relationship with the Trump campaign, after it came to light that Nunes had been functioning as a messenger for the White House on the matter. But he and others now seem to have forgotten that recusal.

HPSCI has become enmeshed in the congressional Republican effort to denigrate the FBI and Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russia matter. That effort obviously is being waged to distract attention from the subject of the investigation and to discredit preemptively any findings unfavorable to the Republican in the White House.

  National Interest

If you're interested in reading the whole thing, the article, by Paul Pillar, who served as an intelligence officer in the 80s, describes what he understands to be the issue in the Nunes memo and how to interpret what is being done with it. It summarizes the points made by an ex-FBI agent in his article about what the memo would need to provide to be considered of any real import.

It's also interesting to me that it's a Republican - Devin Nunes - who's tearing down the trust between the Intel Committee and the FBI/DOJ, whose members are mostly known for their conservative, Republican values.

Among all the other damaging effects of this escapade is that it a may drive a final politicized nail into the coffin of effective oversight of intelligence, at least on the House of Representatives side of Capitol Hill. If this is how a committee majority is to conduct business, and how it is to handle classified information, then neither the American people nor the FBI or other national security agencies have reason any more to believe that effective oversight by this committee is possible.

We had that figured out already.

An irony is that amid all the rhetoric about a deep state and supposed abuses within security agencies, Nunes and company are killing the most effective mechanism that American democracy has for ensuring that such a deep state does not arise and that such abuses do not occur.

So the Trump cabal is actually quite effective at burning down the country. I guess we didn't have a very strong Democracy after all.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.