The story so far

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Power Line

Scott Johnson

July 29 2018

In the Wall Street Journal’s weekend interview feature, columnist Kim Strassel tracks down House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in Tulare, California. She honors him as “Washington’s Public Enemy No. 1” *(accessible here on Outline). Nunes is a straight shooter and dogged public servant. His admirable qualities come through clearly in this illuminating interview.

The interview is also useful. It is useful in reminding us what we have learned in the “collusion” matter so far, of his contribution to what we have learned and the abuse he has taken along the way by defamatory leaks disseminated to the Democrats’ media adjunct.

We remain the dark about the “unmaskings” that Nunes decried way back when. They appear to involve substantial wrongdoing within the Obama administration. Nunes addresses them here:

(Snip)

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* After reading, I now use those 3 little words we all have so much trouble saying...I...Was...Wrong I've spent the entire Trump administration pretty much ignoring this story. I Was Wrong The penny finally dropped, I got a clue. I can now say to quote Plugs Biden "This is a big F***in deal!" Bigger than Watergate? You could make that argument, very easily.

The first: Immediately after joining the Trump transition team, Mr. Nunes faced an onslaught of left-wing claims that

he might be in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. It started on social media, though within months outlets such as MSNBC were openly asking if he was a “Russian agent.” “I’ve been a Russia hawk going way back,” he says. “I was the one who only six months earlier had called the Obama administration’s failure to understand Putin’s plans and intentions the largest intelligence failure since 9/11. So these attacks, surreal—big red flag.”

Mr. Nunes would later come to believe the accusations marked the beginning of a deliberate campaign by Obama officials and the intelligence community to discredit him and sideline him from any oversight effort. “This was November. We, Republicans, still didn’t know about the FBI’s Trump investigation. But they did,” he says. “There was concern I’d figure it out, so they had to get rid of me.”

A second red flag: the sudden rush by a small group of Obama officials to produce a new intelligence assessment two weeks before President Trump’s inauguration, claiming the Russians had acted in 2016 specifically to elect Mr. Trump. “Nobody disagrees the Russians were trying to muddy up Hillary Clinton. Because everyone on the planet believed—including the Russians—she was going to win,” Mr. Nunes says. So it “made no sense” that the Obama administration was “working so hard to make the flip argument—to say ‘Oh, no, no: This was all about electing Trump.’ ” The effort began to make more sense once that rushed intelligence assessment grew into a central premise behind the theory that Mr. Trump’s campaign had colluded with the Russians.

January 2017 also brought then-FBI Director James Comey’s acknowledgment to Congress—the public found out later—that the bureau had been conducting a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign since the previous summer, and that Mr. Comey had actively concealed the probe from Congress. Months earlier, when Mr. Nunes had seen media stories alluding to a Trump investigation, he’d dismissed them. “We’re supposed to get briefed,” he says. “Plus, I was thinking: ‘Comey, FBI, they’re good people and would never do this in an election. Nah.’ ”

When the facts came out, Mr. Nunes was stunned by the form the investigation took. For years he had been central in updating the laws governing surveillance, metadata collection and so forth. “I would never have conceived of FBI using our counterintelligence capabilities to target a political campaign. If it had crossed any of our minds, I can guarantee we’d have specifically written, ‘Don’t do that,’ ” when crafting legislation, he says. “Counterintelligence is looking at people trying to steal our nation’s secrets or working with terrorists. This if anything would be a criminal matter.”

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