1. Devin Nunes (R-Ca). We are still struggling to understand why, specifically, California-based Rep. Devin Nunes has wagered his entire career and future place in the history books on a collaborative effort with the White House to shut down the investigation of Russia's espionage and intelligence efforts against the United States during the 2016 presidential elections.
It cannot seemingly be explained as an attempt to get Trump off the hook for, for example, the Trump Tower meeting we now know about between his top campaign staff and/or family and agents who represented themselves as being "part of" the Russian government's support for Trump's campaign. There would be no reason for Nunes to insert himself in that, at least not to the extent of himself inviting obstruction of justice charges. But he persists, and persists some more, and doubles down.
Listen to him sputter on the Sean Hannity Screaming-Shouty Hour, spouting things about his latest "memo" that even Glenn Beck's chalkboard would find too humiliating to put up with. The man isn't just chewing the scenery, he's dousing it in an expensive vinaigrette first.
“There's clear evidence of collusion—that the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign colluded with the Russians,” Nunes said, using his appearance on prime time’s top-rated cable-news show to decry the supposed “crickets from the media” about the biggest political story of the past week.
What planet is Nunes living on? Somehow Nunes conveniently forgot that law enforcement had been alerted about possible Russian interference well before the Stele revelations. This is what landed Trump's new (and old) campaign buddies on the counterintelligence radar. The Democratic Party (in addition to, lest we forget, a passel of Trump's fellow Republicans) hired a firm to do opposition research on Trump. The opposition research included the efforts of a well-regarded British ex-spy with the sort of worldwide contacts you would expect a British ex-spy to have; it turned up such a trove of information about shady Trump ties that the researchers felt obliged to contact the FBI about what they had learned, for fear that Trump was, at the least, a potential blackmail target.
Perhaps the Hannity audience enjoys watching the Nunes circus, but to the rest of us it looks like a clown lighting himself on fire and daring us all to watch. Nunes repeatedly told Hannity that his memo had turned the tables on Democrats, saying “the counterintelligence investigation should have been opened up against the Hillary campaign when they got ahold of the dossier.” He added: “I just go by the old rule: Whatever they accuse you of doing, they’re actually doing,” Nunes said.
Nunes is quite wedded to this concept that the real crime here is not that anyone on the Trump campaign team, or transition team, or within the White House did anything wrong, but that Democrats found out. He is all-in on the notion that, after going to law enforcement with the information they had learned about Trump's potential Russian ties, not just the investigators, but the Hillary Clinton campaign itself, ought to have been treated as enemies of the state.
This is, lest we forget, batshit. It's utterly insane. It is beyond the realm of rational speech as we know it, and then some. And there's no way to interpret a sitting congressman saying these things other than as an attempt to throw a flash-bang grenade into the discourse and duck out the back before anyone notices.
There is no rational reason for Devin Nunes to be climbing so far out on this limb for the likes of bragging, bleating nobody Carter Page. There is no rational reason for Nunes to go to these rhetorical lengths to shutter an investigation into money laundering by people Trump claims to have barely known. Congress critters are deeply selfish and self-absorbed people, and do not readily torpedo their own careers for the sake of random consultants and advisers. Nunes is a piece of work.
