Devin Nunes's Laughable Spin to Protect Trump Crashes and Burns

By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post

09 February 18

THE MORNING PLUM:

ne of the most comical — or perhaps deeply troubling — aspects of the massive effort by President Trump and his allies to create an alternate narrative to the Russia probe is that it continues unabated, even as the numerous conspiracy theories created to bolster it have, one after another, fallen like dominoes.

This morning, Post fact checker Glenn Kessler offers a comprehensive look at various threads of this alt-narrative that helps illustrate just how buffoonish this whole effort has become. Kessler takes as his starting point a remarkable statement from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who is perhaps Trump’s staunchest bodyguard against accountability on Capitol Hill. Nunes said this in a radio interview:

“The truth is that they [Democrats] are covering up that Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to get dirt on Trump to feed it to the FBI to open up an investigation into the other campaign.”

In a sense, this is a perfect one-sentence distillation of the whole alt-narrative, because it turns the facts entirely upside down: The story isn’t that the Trump campaign may have conspired with a concerted Russian effort to sabotage our democracy that has been documented by U.S. intelligence services. It’s that Clinton actually colluded with Russia to undermine the Trump candidacy — this is the real sense in which Russia sabotaged our democracy — and that the real role of the Deep State was to assist in that effort to swing the election, which, of course, continues today with the Deep State Plot to Remove Trump.

As Kessler shows, everything about this Nunes statement is a lie. The much-ballyhooed Nunes memo was supposed to illustrate that statement, by showing that Deep State operatives improperly obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on the basis of information in the Democratic-funded “Steele dossier,” which was based on former British spy Christopher Steele’s Russian sources and is supposed to show the whole probe was tainted. In fact, the Nunes memo actually revealed that the genesis of the probe was information gathered earlier by the FBI about former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos, which completely gives the lie to Nunes’s claim that dirt on Trump from Clinton is what got the FBI to “open up an investigation.”

What’s more, the Nunes memo also stated that the warrant for surveillance had repeatedly been renewed, which accidentally demonstrates that judges repeatedly saw new evidence that justified continuing that surveillance. As Paul Rosenzweig puts it, this actually “validated the FBI’s investigation,” which further demolishes the Nunes narrative. Meanwhile, as Kessler demonstrates, it’s a huge stretch to claim the Steele dossier represented Clinton-Russia collusion to begin with, since Clinton was far removed from Steele’s reliance on Russian sources.

An ugly pattern

This is part of a pattern, in which one absurd conspiracy theory after another has crashed and burned. Let’s review:

• The Nunes memo actually revealed that the genesis of the FBI probe of Trump-Russia collusion was the activity of a Trump adviser (Papadopoulos) who had been apprised of dirt gathered by Russia on Clinton. It predated the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier, which is at the center of the grand alt-narrative, and showed that the FBI probe had been repeatedly validated by judges.


• Republicans release a September 2016 text between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which said Barack Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.” This is supposed to demonstrate Obama interference in the FBI probe of Clinton. But there was no Clinton probe at the time — it had been resolved in July (and was only reopened in late October). What’s more, associates of Strzok and Page say Obama actually wanted information on Russian meddling. This makes much more sense — and, if true, it shows that this “scandal” is that Obama wanted information on Russian sabotage of our democracy, which Trump still often maintains never happened.


• Republicans darkly said another Strzok-Page text containing the words “secret society” signaled deep FBI corruption. Then the full text was released, and it turned out to be about calendars and appeared to be a joke.


• Congressional GOP investigators are preparing to interview an informant who supposedly has the goods on the Uranium One “scandal,” in which Clinton supposedly authorized a deal in which Russia obtained uranium extraction rights in the United States, in exchange for kickbacks to the Clinton Foundation. But top Oversight and Intelligence committee Democrats just released a letter claiming that the Justice Department privately briefed committee staffers and told them that the Justice Department had actually dismissed the reliability of this informant in a separate investigation. To be fair, this has not been confirmed. But as it is, the idea that the Uranium One deal is a scandal has already been thoroughly debunked. And independent reporting is likely to confirm that account soon enough.

This is just a partial list. To be clear, serious congressional oversight with regard to the intelligence services’ use of surveillance is absolutely appropriate and desirable. But if anything, that only confirms just what a massive abdication we’re seeing here: In GOP hands, this oversight activity is being perverted into a kind of weaponized obfuscation and misdirection campaign designed to guard Trump and his associates from accountability, which is a serious abuse of power and the public trust in its own right. This keeps getting demonstrated again, and again, and again. Yet it continues, unabated and undaunted.