House Intel Chair Nunes Continues His Irresponsible Actions In The Russia Investigation

FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | JANUARY 24, 2018

“It is way past time for Speaker Ryan to completely remove Chairman Nunes from the irresponsible role he is playing in the Russia investigation.”

President Trump’s allies in Congress are doing everything they can to undermine the Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is quietly moving forward, apparently undeterred.

In the latest undermining effort, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) and his staff have prepared a highly controversial secret memo based on classified information that reportedly attacks the FBI’s Russia investigation. A campaign being conducted by outside Trump allies and Russian bots is calling for the public release of the Nunes memo.

Nunes served on the Trump transition team and thus had an inherent conflict of interest in leading the House Russia investigation from the beginning. Speaker Ryan never should have permitted Nunes to serve in this conflicted position.

Nunes’s lack of credibility for this job was starkly demonstrated in March, when he was caught lying to the public about the bizarre role he played in receiving classified information from White House officials, and then returning to the White House to meet with President Trump and present him with that same information, which the President already had.

According to The Washington Post, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said that the new Nunes memo is “highly distorted spin by Nunes,” and that it “distorts the underlying materials and has presented Members with a very misleading impression of what those materials show.”

Nunes has made clear that he sees his job in the investigation as representing the interests of President Trump and not the interests of the American people and the House of Representatives.

It is way past time for Speaker Ryan to completely remove Chairman Nunes from the irresponsible role he is playing in the Russia investigation.

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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections.