We are on genuinely untrodden territory with a faction of House Republicans working to discredit federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies because they are investigating the President and finding damning information about him and his 2016 campaign. As you’ve likely heard, Rep. Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House intel committee had his staff write this “memo” which allegedly presents evidence of intelligence and law enforcement wrongdoing during the 2016 presidential campaign – basically “deep state” plotting against candidate Donald Trump.
Over the last week there’s been a huge campaign on the right to “release the memo”. That campaign has also been supported by Russian intelligence backed social media accounts.
All of this stems from and began with Mike Flynn’s efforts to snoop on the investigators probing his actions during the 2016 campaign which Flynn began as soon as he got into the White House almost exactly one year ago. This is the story of the “review” conducted by Flynn protege Ezra Cohen-Watnick and the whole “un-masking” charade from earlier in the year. Devin Nunes was the Hill leader who made common cause with Flynn and Cohen-Watnick and got himself temporarily knocked off the Russia investigation for his shenanigans. Now he’s back with this. It’s simply a continuation of the un-masking nonsense.
Now we learn that Nunes, after circulating the classified “memo” to the entire House of Representatives, has refused to allow the FBI itself to see the document. CNN just reported this a few moments ago and that comes after a report of the same yesterday from The Daily Beast. Keep in mind, the FBI in its counter-intelligence capacity is the organization being accused in the memo. Nunes is clearly a clown and willing to subvert the rule of law to defend a lawless President. What is striking is that the entire House GOP and, critically, House Speaker Paul Ryan are going along with it.
The FB, of course, needs deep scrutiny and has a history of various misdeeds. But there’s simply no evidence of any misdeeds in this case other than the crime of helping to uncover facts about the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russian intelligence operatives during the 2016 campaign. It’s amazing that this is happening.
