In a case of exquisite and almost certainly non-coincidental timing, almost immediately after Rep. Devin Nunes released Republicans' latest attempt to discredit the intelligence community's investigation of Russian election hacking, new news came to light about the Trump campaign official Nunes, Paul Ryan, and the rest of the Republican House staked their reputations on defending.
Specifically, that he himself asserted to colleagues that he was an 'informal' adviser to the Kremlin.
The letter, dated Aug. 25, 2013, was sent by Page to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript he had submitted for publication, according to an editor who worked with Page.
“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” the letter reads.
The Nunes "memo" is focused entirely on the notion that the FBI could never have known about Page's potential skullduggery if it were not for meddling Democrats who financed an investigation into Trump's Russian ties by a British ex-intelligence officer. But Page had already earned a spot on the FBI's radar in, yes, 2013, when U.S. intelligence met with Page to warn him that Russian agents were attempting to recruit him as an asset. Page rebuffed them; indeed, only two months later Page was telling at least this associate of ties within the Kremlin itself.
In making the case that Page’s crimes ought not have been discovered in the first place, the Nunes memo misleadingly ignores the FBI's past suspicions of Page. It may be that this new revelation, provided to TIME by an unspecified source, was released now as way of rebuttal, to emphasize just how misleading Nunes' defense of Page truly is.
We should also remember that FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with House Speaker Paul Ryan before the Nunes memo was released in an attempt to appeal to Ryan to shut down Nunes' request for classified information from the Department of Justice—a stance that may have been based on the suspicion that Nunes was going to misuse or improperly divulge the documents, or based on Nunes' status as a member of the Trump transition team, and therefore a potential target of the investigation himself. Ryan, however, backed Nunes.
Any suspicions Wray and Rosenstein's may have had that Nunes would use the information in such a way as to jeopardize the Russia investigation and/or the prosecutions of Trump allies caught up in that investigation proved spot-on. But we do not know what specific intelligence information was shared with Nunes at Paul Ryan's order, and it's likely that Nunes will continue to leak that information as needed in order to continue to discredit the investigation—or, as Trump ally, to give targets of the investigation a heads-up on what, specifically, government investigators may have discovered about them. The next meeting between Paul Ryan and Department of Justice officials is likely to be far more heated than this last one was.