Devin Nunes: Rotten

Nunes served on the executive committee of the Trump transition team with Flynn, he noted, which was headed by Vice President Mike Pence.

  Newsweek

We could begin and end there. How can it be possible for Nunes to be investigating the activity of a team he served on? Why is this not an issue?  He will undoubtedly be at least a witness, if not a target.

Nunes grew up on a Central Valley, California farm and concentrated on water issues when he came to Congress in 2003. But his fundraising prowess for fellow Republicans endeared him to Representative Paul Ryan and House Speaker John Boehner, who in 2013 anointed him chairman of the intelligence panel.

Like many hawks back then, Nunes was in awe of Flynn, who had won praise for revolutionizing the hunt for terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[...]

[Flynn's] battlefield talents didn’t transfer well to running the DIA from 2012 to 2014. Not only were his executive skills lacking, according to many observers, including former Army general and Secretary of State Colin Powell, he quickly developed a reputation for indulging in conspiracy theories—or “Flynn facts,” his aides derisively called them.

But Nunes embraced them.

[...]

The congressman’s “nutty” reputation was enhanced in 2013 when he insisted on moving a joint U.S.-U.K intelligence base from England to the Azores, his ancestral home. The $1.2 billion price tag and national security concerns about relocating to such an obscure spot in the mid-Atlantic doomed the effort, according to an investigation by the National Review. But in an early preview of charges that he “cherry-picked” items for his Russiagate memo to undermine the FBI and Justice Department, the Pentagon accused Nunes’s staff of manipulating the numbers on the Azores gambit.

[...]

Nunes and Flynn evidently maintained close ties through the election and beyond, even as Flynn’s world was beginning to unravel. [...] “I talk to Flynn virtually everyday, if not multiple times a day,” Nunes told me in the late December 2016 interview. “Seldom there's a day that goes by that I don't talk to Flynn, and especially right after the campaign, directly.”

No wonder Nunes is going ballistic over the collusion investigation. He was joined at the hip to Flynn, who is reportedly now working for Mueller. He's got nothing to lose - or everything.

Despite the troubling revelations about Flynn’s Turkish deadlings, Nunes accompanied him to a January 18 breakfast at the Trump Hotel in Washington featuring Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, according to a report in the Istanbul newspaper Daily Sabah.

[...]

About six weeks before the elections, Flynn and two business associates attended a secret New York meeting with Cavusoglu and Berat Albayrak, Erdogan’s son-in-law and the country’s energy minister. Also present: former CIA Director and then-Trump senior adviser James Woolsey. The topic: Plans to kidnap the prominent exiled anti-Erdogan cleric Fethullah Gulen in Pennsylvania and return him to Turkey. The meeting stayed secret until late March 2017, when The Wall Street Journal exposed it.

[...]

“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.”

How in the name of Sam Hill is he on the investigating team?

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.

How is he still even in Congress?

When the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation, Nunes stepped down from his panel’s slow-moving investigation into Kremlin election interference. Temporarily.

Mind-boggling. This is as insane as America now having something called Free Speech Zones.

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 and FBI probes. 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 agencies, as well as the State Department.

Unbelievable. I give up.

Nunes, said David Barrett, an authority on Congress and the spy agencies, has added to the partisan rancor on the Hill instead of isolating the committee from the political wars, which it needs to gain the trust of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to admit their mistakes.

How could he do otherwise? He's in up to his eyeballs in the collusion aspect of a very serious investigation. People will likely go to jail. He could well be one of them.

“The DOJ and FBI can initiate an obstruction of justice charge against anyone, including Congressman Nunes,” he told Newsweek. 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,” said 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.”

Well, I guess if Mueller is investigating Nunes for his part in Russian collusion, that would be a bit confounding. There shouldn't be this problem. Nunes clearly should not be on the House Intel investigation.

Whatever. I give up. This is all most insane.

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