Trump And Devin Nunes Have Gamed This Out Since 2022
Nunes had been Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, but according to CBS News, "he was forced to recuse himself from that committee's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election amid an investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics into whether he had leaked classified information." In other words, he was one of the key people who knew everything about the "Russian meddling" when the whole scheme was being cooked up. Nunes resigned from Congress to take that job with Trump. I never thought Trump just wanted him to run Truth Social.
Instead, Trump hired him to keep him nearby during his time out of office, but on the day of his second inauguration, Trump named him Chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. According to Wikipedia,
Most of the board's work is classified, but one public investigation involved the loss of U.S. nuclear secrets to China from the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1990s.
In fact, it sounds as if the Board does pretty much exactly what the president tells it to do. I would not be the least bit surprised to hear that Nunes is currently working closely with Director Gabbard. But let's look a little more at what Nunes may have known during the first days of Trump's first term. According to Wikipedia,
On March 22, 2017, during the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, Nunes held a press conference to announce that he had received information that the communications of "some members of Trump's transition team, including potentially the president himself" had been "incidentally collected" by the intelligence community and "widely disseminated" throughout the intelligence community. He added that it was legal FISA surveillance, and unrelated to Russia. It was later revealed that it involved Russia and the Trump transition team. The surveillance was of multiple phone conversations between Michael Flynn, a member of the transition team, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which occurred after Flynn sought advice from the Trump transition team at Mar-a-Lago[.]
This surveillance led to Michael Flynn's resignation as National Security Adviser on February 13, 2017. CNN outlines the circumstances:
Three days after Trump officially takes office, US officials say investigators are scrutinizing several calls between Flynn and Russia’s ambassador. Spicer, now the White House Press Secretary, reiterates that Flynn told him sanctions were not discussed in the calls.
At some point in January, the Justice Department warns the Trump administration that Flynn misled administration officials regarding his communications with Kislyak and is potentially vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The message is delivered by Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who is fired on January 30 for refusing to enforce Trump’s controversial travel ban barring citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.
By Febuary 10, public allegations emerged that Flynn did in fact discuss sanctions with Kislyak, and by February 13,
As the reports emerge, Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway tells MSNBC that Flynn “does enjoy the full confidence of the president,” but around an hour later, Spicer says Trump is “evaluating the situation.”
Flynn resigns a few hours later, admitting he had “inadvertently briefed the Vice President-elect and others with incomplete information” regarding the phone calls with Kislyak and apologizes.
Over the following weeks, a conflict ensued between Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee Chair, and then-Rep Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat, that appears to have involved the nature of the surveillance that led to Flynn's resignation. The full details have never been made public, but they appear to be connected with the current criminal referrals of Comey, Clapper, and Brennan. At the Nunes Wikipedia link above,
In late March 2017, Nunes canceled a public hearing in which former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former National Security Agency Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan were to testify, saying he wanted to hear FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers in a classified setting first. Democrats criticized Nunes's decision and said he was trying to protect the White House from damaging revelations.
According to the Atlantic link just above,
About an hour later, Schiff held his own press conference, calling Nunes’s announcement a “serious mistake” and accusing him of bowing to White House pressure.
. . . The dueling press conferences cap an astonishing week in the Russia investigation. On Monday, the committee held hearings with Rogers and Comey, in which Comey confirmed for the first time that the FBI is investigating potential collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia to interfere in the election.
On Wednesday, Nunes made a strange announcement in which he said he had obtained documents about surveillance of Trump team officials. But Nunes’s revelation was extremely vague. . .
Since much of this controversy seems to have involved whatever led to Michael Flynn's resignation, it's intriguing that Flynn himself has been chiming in, At 3:18 in the clip embedded above, he says,
What Devin Nunes did in the March/April timeframe of 2017, was he came forward to the White House and said, "Hey, this is all fake. This is all fake." And Devin was then sidelined by Speaker Ryan from the House Select Committee on Intelligence, he was the chairman at the time. So there's some GOP dirt here that has got to be looked at, because the American people have lost so much trust in all of the institutions of government.
In a duifferent interview, he gives more details on the circumstances that led to his resignation:
Sally Yates and Mary McCord, who was head of the National Security Division for the Department of Justice—Sally Yates was the acting Attorney General—went over to the White House like two or three days prior to me having to be resigned and me being fired on the 13th of February. I think it was the date.
So Mike Pence, Reince Priebus are in the Situation Room in the White House, and Mary McCord, Andy McCabe is the other name, and Sally Yates was the third name that came and briefed Mike Pence on a document. And Mike Pence—he had Reince Priebus call me up while they were all together. And he said, “I just reviewed this document. The document shows that you talked about sanctions”—something I never talked about, ever.
I never talked to Mike Pence about them. I never talked about them with anybody. Never talked to the Russian ambassador about sanctions. Mike Pence told me that he just saw a document where I discussed sanctions. So that document is either—that’s either a lie, or Mike Pence was lying. Somebody, somewhere in between.
What I believe is that Mike Pence—I believe that part of their effort was to try to figure out a way, because later on, we now know from other cases that came out, as well as mine, that there was a 25th Amendment that was going to be put on the table further down the road. So this is an effort to get rid of Donald J. Trump.
Well, under the 25th Amendment, the vice president coordinates any effort to declare the president unfit. All we know right now is that Sally Yates, Mary McCord, and Andy McCabe seem to have been behind an effort that now may look hinky to push Michael Flynn out as Trump's National Security Adviser using transcripts of surveillance that may have been illegal or may have been faked. Devin Nunes at the time appears to have had questions about this very issue, but pressure from Democrats forced him to recuse himself from investigating, and there the matter stayed.Except that Nunes is now involved in whatever is happening behind the scenes. By the way, all of a sudden now-Sen Schiff has got problems with mortgage fraud. You can't tell me Trump and Nunes haven't gamed this out over a period of years.
