Frank Bruni in the New York Times:
As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes, a California Republican, is a principal sleuth in the paramount inquiry into whether members of the Trump campaign were in cahoots with Russia, and from all appearances, he either doesn’t want to know the answer or has determined it already — in President Trump’s favor. …
The Intelligence Committee isn’t supposed to be a partisan arm of the majority party (though it has behaved that way in the past). And any collusion with the White House is a betrayal of its special oversight role.
Sam Stein at Huffington Post:
Nunes, who has otherwise been tight-lipped about his source, told Bloomberg’s Eli Lake on Monday that his source was an intelligence official, not a White House staffer. Even if that is true, it would have had to have been an intelligence official with cleared White House access (potentially an official on temporary detail with the National Security Council), or Nunes and his source would have had to have been let in by someone else from the White House.
Devin Nunes is working for the White House at a time when he’s supposed to be investigating it. The tension between party loyalty and doing what’s right is a dilemma that some in Congress have been able to resolve in the past. However, Nunes isn’t just a Republican congressman working with a Republican president. He was on Trump’s transition team. Much of the information in question is from the transition period. It’s possible, even likely, that Nunes himself is involved in incidents now under review.
And it’s enough to doom any possibility that Nunes can continue to lead this investigation.
All of this is irregular enough to peg him as a puppet of the Trump administration or a complete boob. Either way, he has surrendered his investigation’s integrity — and his own.
Comments are closed on this story.