If you don't know who Devin Nunes is, don't feel too bad. Not many Americans had heard of the California congressman until the last few weeks, when he emerged as a key player in the investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with the Russian government during the election—and became a weirdly controversial figure thanks to a clandestine visit to the White House last Tuesday night.
Nunes, who has been in the House since 2003, is the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which along with its Senate counterpart keeps tabs on what America's vast network of spies and intelligence agencies are up to. It's a complex job, and these committees have traditionally had a bipartisan sheen—the ranking minority member on the committee, an Oregon Democrat named Adam Schiff, is supposed to be kept in the loop on key investigations and generally plugged into sensitive developments. Congress may be a rancorous place where actual fights broke out back in the 19th century, but the intel committees are theoretically above the fray. Oversight of the intelligence world is (rightly) regarded as a big, important task, and spooks generally know to respect the members of Congress on those committees.
"They can make life very difficult for you—as they're doing now," David Gomez, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, told me of intelligence committee chairs. These congresspeople can influence the funding available to the FBI and NSA, after all.
But even as intelligence chairs are powerful, they're rarely all that famous. What makes Nunes different is that his committee has been tasked with looking into ties between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia—a topic the FBI is also investigating. Adding to the fun is that Nunes is a close ally of the president, having served on his transition team, which only complicates things further. Indeed, over the past week, Nunes has made what seem like increasingly desperate attempts to shield the White House from too much bad news at once—or maybe even sink the Russia probe entirely.
Earlier this year, when Americans were still getting acquainted with the idea that Russia had interfered with their democracy, Nunes generally seemed to indicate the investigation would go wherever it led. And as recently as a couple of weeks ago, Nunes publicly disputed Trump's (now infamous) assertion that his predecessor, Barack Obama, ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower. But at the Intelligence Committee hearing last Monday where FBI Director James Comey and NSA head Michael Rogers testified, Nunes and his Republican allies focused mainly on the leaks to the press rather than links between Trump associates and Russia.
Then, last Wednesday, Nunes held a press conference to announce that he actually did think Trump associates had been "incidentally" caught up in (ostensibly legal) surveillance by the US government. This became one of the lead news items of the day, with Trump himself referencing it multiple times in an interview with Time, apparently because the president believed that Nunes's announcement justified his accusation about the Obama administration spying on him.
Then things really got weird.
People started to question where Nunes has obtained his information, and how. Multiple reports now show that last Tuesday evening, the night before the press conference, Nunes traveled to the White House to review sensitive intelligence material and meet with a key source. (He did so, he told Bloomberg, because there was a facility there where people can view classified information. As national security reporters quickly pointed out, however, similarly secure locations exist in other places too.) Then, after his press conference the next day, Nunes briefed the president on possible federal surveillance of his campaign team without talking to his fellow committee members first.
That's a breach of congressional protocol, and more concerning since it's the president's buddies who are under investigation. Congressman Schiff and other prominent Democrats are now calling for Nunes to recuse himself from investigating Trump, despite some kind of closed-door apology from the embattled Republican. Even some Republicans, like senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham—both critics of Trump—think Nunes is just acting too damn weird for comfort.
"He seems not to have a basic grasp of how intelligence works," Gomez, a self-described political conservative, told me.
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Increasingly, the question many now have is: What the heck is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee doing receiving and disseminating leaked information?
"Normally direct access to that information is a very regulated process," Gomez said of raw intelligence, bemoaning the Congressman's apparent disregard for the rules of the game. To the former agent and plenty of other observers, it seems like raw political calculation—and loyalty to Trump—is dictating Nunes's behavior.
"There is some evidence that Nunes isn't just an apologist for the executive branch—the fear or the concern is that he is in effect obstructing the investigation," Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written on intelligence oversight, told me.
The congressman went so far as to tell Fox News's Sean Hannity (a hardcore Trump supporter) in a recent interview that felt a "duty and obligation" to Trump, who's "been taking a lot of heat in the news media," to let him know about that "incidental" spying. Oh, also, apparently Nunes isn't even "sure" that Trump associates were actually monitored by US intelligence or if they were just being discussed by surveillance targets—which would change the whole nature of what he said at that press conference.
Nunes's clear support of Trump and his willingness to throw up roadblocks in the investigation his own committee is conducting also manifested itself in the case of Sally Yates. The former (acting) attorney general, an Obama holdover, was the one who briefed the Trump White House on National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's notorious contact with the Russian ambassador—including a conversation that Flynn misled Vice President Mike Pence and the media about, and which later led to his resignation. Despite Yates's obvious importance to both strands of the investigation (Russia connections and leaks), Nunes cancelled the hearing where she was supposed to testify. At the same time, the White House reportedly objected to her testifying at all.
The good news is that Nunes and the House intelligence committee aren't the only game in town. So far as we can tell, the FBI and Senate intelligence committees are proceeding. (The next step may be a closed-door meeting between FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers and members of the intel committees.) But Nunes's displays of partisanship just show how quickly precedents and decorum are broken in Trump's DC. And as Clark explained, Watergate showed America how probes into the executive branch can be tainted when the federal officials doing the investigating show the president and his people exactly the sort of thing they're not supposed to be privy to.
Is that what Nunes is doing right now—not just slowing the House's investigation, but compromising those being conducted by the FBI and Senate, too?
"The concern is whether he will throw the investigation—whether he will impair the investigation, and prevent it from harming the president," Clark told me, later adding, "During the first four years of the George W. Bush administration, the committees were mostly asleep. In some ways that's not as bad as what we may be seeing now."
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