Representative Nunes of California Vindicates Trump

[lennygoran]

"If you believe that, then have I got a bridge for you (or "I have a bridge to sell you")."

Regards, Len

[lennygoran]

What a pathetic apology-Nunez has to go! Regards, Len



Nunes apologizes for going directly to White House with monitoring claims

Nancy Pelosi calls the Intelligence Committee chairman a 'stooge for the president of the United States.'

By Austin Wright and Nolan D. McCaskill

03/23/17 11:16 AM EDT

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes apologized to members of his panel Thursday for not informing Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat, before going public with allegations that Trump transition messages were inadvertently intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

A committee aide said Nunes (R-Calif.) apologized "for not sharing information about the documents he saw with the minority before going public” and that “he pledged to work with them on this issue.”

The apology from Nunes came as congressional Democrats on Thursday slammed him for his perceived allegiance to the Trump administration, questioning whether he is fit to lead to an impartial investigation into possible ties between Trump’s associates and Russian officials.

Schiff (D-Calif.) told NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Thursday that committee members still haven’t been privy to the information Nunes shared with the White House. Nunes has said he is not in possession of the information yet and that he hopes it will be delivered to his committee on Friday.

“At this point, the only people who do know are the chairman and the president. And given that the president’s associates are the subject in part of the investigation, that’s wholly inappropriate, and, unfortunately, I think it really impugns the credibility of the chairman in terms of his ability to conduct an independent investigation,” Schiff said.

During an earlier, brief exchange with reporters Thursday morning, Nunes was asked whether the information he alluded to Wednesday came from the White House. Nunes stressed that “we have to keep our sources and methods here very, very quiet” and defended his “judgment call” to brief the president while other committee members were left in the dark, despite Trump and his associates being part of the focus of multiple investigations.

“The president didn’t invite me over. I called down there and invited myself, because I thought he needed to understand what I saw and that he needed to try to get that information because he has every right to see it,” Nunes told reporters.

Committee member Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said she believed Nunes' accusations on Wednesday had been directed by the White House. She pointed to an interview Trump did with Fox News earlier this month in which he said his administration would be "submitting things" to the House Intelligence Committee "very soon."

"I am of the opinion that this was orchestrated either from the White House or by ... someone associated with the White House," Speier said. "This is a three-act play, and we're now seeing it."

On Wednesday, Nunes held a news conference and then briefed Trump on evidence he had been shown by a "source" that, following November's election, Trump transition team members were caught up in incidental surveillance of foreign targets. He said the identities of some of these transition team members had been "unmasked," even though U.S. persons typically have their identities shielded when caught up in inadvertent surveillance, and that intelligence reports about the Trump transition were widely disseminated across the U.S. intelligence community.

Democrats countered that the unmasking of names should be something the committee tackles as part of its Russia investigation, not something that is immediately briefed to the White House.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday called Nunes a "stooge for the president of the United States."

"I think he's demonstrated very clearly that there is no way there can be an impartial investigation under his leadership on that committee," Pelosi said. "It speaks very clearly to the need for an outside independent commission."


http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/n ... ims-236415

[lennygoran]

Agree with Schumer and Pelosi-Nunes has to go-so what did he find and who told him! Regards, Len

House Democrats Ask Devin Nunes to Recuse Himself From Russia Inquiry

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and EMMARIE HUETTEMAN MARCH 27, 2017


WASHINGTON — Top House Democrats on Monday called on the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to recuse himself from the panel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, thrusting the entire inquiry into jeopardy amid what they described as mounting evidence he was too close to President Trump to be impartial.

The demands followed revelations that the committee’s chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, had met on White House grounds with a source who showed him secret American intelligence reports. The reports, Mr. Nunes said last week, showed that Mr. Trump or his closest associates may have been “incidentally” swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.

The new revelation that the information actually came from a meeting held on the grounds of the White House intensified questions about what prompted Mr. Nunes to make the claim about the intelligence gathering, and who gave him the information.

Representatives Adam B. Schiff of California, the committee’s top Democrat, and Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, suggested that Mr. Nunes, who served on the Trump transition team, was simply too close to the White House to run an independent, thorough inquiry.


“The public cannot have the necessary confidence that matters involving the president’s campaign or transition team can be objectively investigated or overseen by the chairman,” Mr. Schiff said on Monday night.

Still, Mr. Schiff stopped short of pulling the panel’s Democrats out of the investigation. Doing so could jeopardize Democrats’ influence over the inquiry and, importantly, their access to intelligence on possible ties between Trump associates and Moscow.

The House Intelligence Committee is running one of the three investigations into Russian interference in the election, and possible ties between Trump associates and Russia. The Senate Intelligence Committee is running its own inquiry, and the F.B.I. has carried out a broad counterintelligence investigation since July.

By most accounts, the Senate and F.B.I. investigations remain on track, unlike the House inquiry, which appears to have increasingly descended into a sideshow since its first public hearing a week ago. That was when James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., publicly disclosed the bureau’s investigation for the first time. Days later, Mr. Nunes made his first disclosure about Mr. Trump or his associates being caught in American intelligence gathering, prompting critics to argue that he was trying to shift attention and provide an assist to the White House at a crucial moment.

The revelation that Mr. Nunes had viewed intelligence materials on White House grounds the day before bolstering the administration’s case fueled damaging speculation that he was acting at the instruction of the president. That could prove fatal to the bipartisan investigation, which has hinged on the ability of Mr. Nunes to conduct a neutral inquiry while maintaining the trust and cooperation of Mr. Schiff.

Ms. Pelosi echoed Mr. Schiff’s call for Mr. Nunes to recuse himself, saying his behavior had “tarnished” his post and urging Speaker Paul D. Ryan to speak out.

“Speaker Ryan must insist that Chairman Nunes at least recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation immediately,” she said in a statement. “That leadership is long overdue.”

In an apparent attempt to change the subject, Mr. Trump on Monday night questioned why the House Intelligence Committee is not looking into connections between Hillary Clinton and Russian officials.

A few minutes later, he posted a second message on Twitter, concluding, “Trump Russia story is a hoax.”

The spokesman for Mr. Nunes, Jack Langer, said the congressman met with his source at the White House because he needed access to a secure location where people with security clearances can legally view classified information. But such facilities can also be found in the Capitol building, and at other locations across Washington.


Senator Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “more than suspicious” that Mr. Nunes went to the White House complex, pointing out that he would “have to be escorted” while there.

“Who is he meeting with?” Mr. Warner said in an interview with NBC. “Was it a source or somebody from the administration?”

Mr. Langer did not address those concerns on Monday. In a brief statement, he said: “Chairman Nunes met with his source at the White House grounds in order to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source.”

He added, “The chairman is extremely concerned by the possible improper unmasking of names of U.S. citizens, and he began looking into this issue even before President Trump tweeted his assertion that the Trump Tower had been wiretapped.”

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said on Monday that White House officials had no previous knowledge of Mr. Nunes’s visit to the White House grounds, saying the only information he had came from “public reports.”

He also said officials were “not concerned” about the prospect that someone within the executive branch had leaked classified information to Mr. Nunes.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, accused Mr. Nunes of weakening not only the committee’s tradition of bipartisanship but also Congress itself. He asked Mr. Ryan to replace Mr. Nunes.

“He has not been cooperating like someone who is interested in getting to the unvarnished truth,” Mr. Schumer said.

Acknowledging that the incidental collection from surveillance appeared to be legal, Mr. Nunes last week said his concerns surrounded additional names that may have been improperly “unmasked.” Normally, intelligence agencies mask the identities of American citizens who are incidentally present in intercepted communications.

Mr. Schiff said that Mr. Nunes also worried that anyone viewing the distributed reports could decipher whom they were discussing even though the names were masked.

Mr. Nunes repeatedly declined to offer any details about the source of what he characterized as “dozens” of classified intelligence reports, which Mr. Schiff accused him of viewing in a “dead-of-night excursion.” Mr. Nunes said only that the information had come to him after the committee’s public hearing on Monday.

On Friday, Mr. Nunes declined to say whether that information had come from the White House.

“You can ask me every single name that exists on the planet, and I’m still not going to tell you who our sources are,” he told reporters.

Mr. Nunes then defended his decision to bypass Mr. Schiff and go to the White House, saying he felt a “duty” to tell Mr. Trump because of Democrats’ “relentless” political attacks.

“If we would have crossed paths in the hall, maybe I would have said something to him,” Mr. Nunes said in an interview. “But what I was trying to do was get to the president as quick as possible.”

At that point, Mr. Trump seized on the information, saying he felt “somewhat” vindicated in his wiretapping claim against former President Barack Obama — debunked by the F.B.I. director and the director of the National Security Agency, as well as the heads of the Senate and House investigations, including Mr. Nunes.

Get politics and Washington news updates via Facebook, Twitter and in the Morning Briefing newsletter.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/p ... -news&_r=0

[lennygoran]

I do hope that hearing which is briefly described below can now go on right where the public can see it--out in the open---Nunes in his cloak and dagger attempt to vindicate Trump has to go. My thanks to the NY Times for it's sleuthing! Spicer indicated he has no objection to Yates and the others appearing before the committee and the invitation has been written and only needs Nunes's signature. Regards, Len




"Chairman just cancelled open Intelligence Committee hearing with (former Director of National Intelligence James) Clapper, (former CIA Director John) Brennan and (former deputy Attorney General Sally) Yates in attempt to choke off public info," Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the committee tweeted moment before going to speak to the press Friday morning. "

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/24/politics/ ... elligence/





2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, MAGGIE HABERMAN and ADAM GOLDMANMARCH 30, 2017


WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials helped provide Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed that President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.

The revelation on Thursday that White House officials disclosed the reports, which Mr. Nunes then discussed with Mr. Trump, is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the presidential election.

It is the latest twist of a bizarre Washington drama that began after dark on March 21, when Mr. Nunes got a call from a person he has described only as a source. The call came as he was riding across town in an Uber car, and he quickly diverted to the White House. The next day, Mr. Nunes gave a hastily arranged news conference before going to brief Mr. Trump on what he had learned the night before from — as it turns out — White House officials.

The chain of events — and who helped provide the intelligence to Mr. Nunes — was detailed to The New York Times by four American officials.

Since disclosing the existence of the intelligence reports, Mr. Nunes has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe going to the committee with sensitive information. In his public comments, he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.
Amid Trump Inquiry, a Primer on Surveillance Practices and Privacy
The F.B.I. investigation into possible Trump campaign coordination with Russia and claims by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee raise questions.

That does not appear to be the case. Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and was previously counsel to Mr. Nunes’s committee. Though neither has been accused of breaking any laws, they do appear to have sought to use intelligence to advance the political goals of the Trump administration.

Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, refused to confirm or deny at his daily briefing that Mr. Ellis and Mr. Cohen-Watnick were Mr. Nunes’s sources. The administration’s concern was the substance of the intelligence reports, not how they ended up in Mr. Nunes’s hands, Mr. Spicer said.

The “obsession with who talked to whom, and when, is not the answer,” Mr. Spicer said. “It should be the substance.”

Jack Langer, a spokesman for Mr. Nunes, said in a statement, “As he’s stated many times, Chairman Nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources.”

Mr. Cohen-Watnick, 30, is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who served on the Trump transition team and was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser.

He was nearly pushed out of his job this month by Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who replaced Mr. Flynn as national security adviser, but survived after the intervention of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Stephen K. Bannon, Mr.

The officials who detailed the newly disclosed White House role said that this month, shortly after Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that he was wiretapped during the campaign on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.

There were conflicting accounts of what prompted Mr. Cohen-Watnick to dig into the intelligence. One official with direct knowledge of the events said Mr. Cohen-Watnick began combing through intelligence reports this month in an effort to find evidence that would justify Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts about wiretapping.

But another person who was briefed on the events said Mr. Cohen-Watnick came upon the information as he was reviewing how widely intelligence reports on intercepts were shared within the American spy agencies. He then alerted the N.S.C. general counsel, but the official said Mr. Cohen-Watnick was not the person who showed the reports to Mr. Nunes.

That person and a third official said it was then Mr. Ellis who allowed Mr. Nunes to view the material.

The intelligence reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle before his inauguration, officials said.

The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the intelligence and to avoid angering Mr. Cohen-Watnick and Mr. Ellis. Officials say Mr. Cohen-Watnick has been reviewing the reports from his fourth-floor office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where the National Security Council is based.
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The officials’ description of the intelligence is in line with Mr. Nunes’s characterization of the material, which he said was not related to the Russia investigations when he first disclosed its existence.

According to Mr. Nunes, who served on the Trump transition team, he met his source on the grounds of the White House. He said he needed a secure location where people with security clearances could legally view classified information, though such facilities could also be found in the Capitol building and at other locations across Washington.

The next day, Mr. Nunes gave a news briefing at the Capitol and then returned to the White House to brief Mr. Trump on the information before telling other committee members about what he had reviewed. His actions have fueled criticism that the committee, under his leadership, is unable to conduct a serious, independent investigation.

On Thursday, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he needed clarification on whether White House officials had pursued “a circuitous route” to feed Mr. Nunes the materials so he could then hand them to Mr. Trump.

“If that was designed to hide the origin of the materials, that raises profound questions about just what the White House is doing that need to be answered,” he said. He later said he accepted an invitation on Thursday to review the same materials that Mr. Nunes had seen.

Yet even before Thursday, the view among Democrats and even some Republicans was that Mr. Nunes was given access to the intelligence reports to divert attention from the investigations into Russian meddling, and to bolster Mr. Trump’s debunked claims of having been wiretapped.


On both counts, Mr. Nunes appears to have succeeded: The House inquiry into Russian meddling that he is leading has descended into a sideshow since he disclosed the information, and the administration has portrayed his information as vindicating the president’s wiretapping claims.

Yet Mr. Nunes has dismissed Democratic calls to step aside. Instead, he has canceled all committee hearings for now, stalling his own investigation, which opened last week with a hearing during which James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., publicly disclosed that the bureau’s investigation into Russian meddling included an examination of any evidence that Trump associates had colluded in the effort.

The chaotic situation prompted the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is running its own investigation, to bluntly state on Wednesday that their work had nothing to do with the House inquiry. And television news programs have been dominated by arguments about whether the incidental intelligence gathering of Mr. Trump and his associates was the real issue, or simply a distraction from the Russia investigations.

Mr. Nunes has acknowledged that the incidental intelligence gathering on Trump associates last year was not necessarily unlawful, and that it was not specifically directed at Mr. Trump or people close to him. American intelligence agencies typically monitor foreign officials of allied and hostile countries, and they routinely sweep up communications linked to Americans who may be taking part in the conversation or are being spoken about.

The real issue, Mr. Nunes has said, was that he could figure out the identities of Trump associates from reading reports about intercepted communications that were shared among Obama administration officials with top security clearances.

He said some Trump associates were also identified by name in the reports. Normally, intelligence agencies mask the identities of American citizens who are incidentally present in intercepted communications, though knowledgeable readers can often figure out the identities in context.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/us/p ... -news&_r=0

[arepo]

Nunes just recused himself from the chairmanship of the committee.
Perhaps this fiasco will begin to get on with the business of unearthing the scoundrels.
The nightmare of the Trump era continues.

cliftwood

[lennygoran]

Spent a busy day in nyc today but finally got to my NYTimes-very good news! Len


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/p ... -news&_r=0

[John F]

Nunes just recused himself from the chairmanship of the committee.

No, he's still committee chairman - just from the committee's investigation of Russian interference with the election.

[lennygoran]

It's about time we heard some more on this-what will Trump do next to deflect the probe-start World war 3! Regards, Len



House Intel Panel ‘Back On Track’: Yates, Brennan, Clapper Asked To Testify

By Allegra Kirkland Published April 21, 2017, 12:49 PM EDT

After a troubled two months that saw the “temporary” recusal of Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), announced Friday that the panel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election was “back on track.”

Schiff and the new senior Republican on the committee, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), sent out letters asking key Obama administration officials and senior intelligence officials to testify before the committee.

FBI Director James Comey and National Security Advisor Adm. Mike Rogers were invited to appear at a closed hearing on May 2, according to a statement from Schiff’s office. Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates also were asked to appear in an open hearing that would be scheduled after May 2.

Those officials were initially scheduled to come before the committee in March. But Nunes scrapped their appearances after going public with claims that he’d seen intelligence reports that showed information about President Donald Trump and his staffers was “incidentally collected,” and Nunes asserted that the identities of those persons were inappropriately unmasked in the reports.

Other lawmakers from both parties who later viewed the same reports said the documents showed no evidence of wrongdoing. At the time of the cancelations, Schiff charged that Nunes was trying to “choke off” public information about the Russia probe.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/s ... k-hearings

[lennygoran]

I'm very much concerned to see Nunes back in the causing so much trouble--this guy seems very dangerous to me. He has tried forever to vindicate Trump and it's just too bad he himself was vindicated last month. Regards, Len


Devin Nunes, targeting Mueller and the FBI, alarms Democrats and some Republicans with his tactics



Rep. Devin Nunes, once sidelined by an ethics inquiry from leading the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe, is reasserting the full authority of his position as chairman just as the GOP appears poised to challenge special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.

The California Republican was cleared in December of allegations he improperly disclosed classified information while accusing the Obama administration of exposing the identities of Trump affiliates on surveillance reports. Since clearing his name, Nunes has stepped up his attacks on Mueller’s team and the law enforcement agencies around it, including convening a group of Intelligence Committee Republicans to draft a likely report on “corruption” among the investigators working for the special counsel.

Although Nunes has not officially wrested his panel’s Russia probe back from the Republicans he deputized to run it, the chairman’s reemergence as a combative Trump loyalist has raised alarm among Democrats that the future of the investigation may be clipped short or otherwise undermined. Even some of Nunes’s GOP allies have expressed concern about his tactics, prompting rare public warnings that he should temper his attacks on federal law enforcement.



“I’m interested in getting access to the information and not the drama,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said last month, when Nunes began threatening contempt citations for FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein in the wake of revelations that former Mueller team members had exchanged ­anti-Trump texts.

A ‘coup in America?’ Fox News escalates anti-Mueller rhetoric

Republican lawmakers and Fox News question the integrity of the FBI, as special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe intensifies. (Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)

More recently, Gowdy said that his “heart would be broken” if Nunes follows through on reported plans to issue a corruption exposé about the FBI, citing concerns that issuing such a report outside the context of a comprehensive investigation of the Justice Department could prove damaging to law enforcement.

Gowdy, a member of the Intelligence panel who also chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, suggested that Nunes has taken some of these steps without the express blessing of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who has been involved in crafting the GOP’s multipronged approach to examining a string of allegations from Russian election interference to alleged mismanagement at the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.

A spokesman for Nunes declined to comment.

But Nunes’s moves coincide with what Democrats say is a coordinated GOP effort to shutter the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe, publicly absolve President Trump of the most serious allegations against him, and refocus the House’s resources against the law enforcement officials, such as Mueller, who continue to investigate Trump.

For months, Democrats have kept an unofficial count of the ways they say Nunes worked behind the scenes during the time he was under ethics investigation to slow or stymie the Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe. Nunes never relinquished his sole, unchecked authority to sign off on subpoenas even as he handed the day-to-day operations to Reps. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), Gowdy and Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.). People familiar with the committee’s work estimated that Nunes’s effective veto cost Democrats dozens of requests for interviews and documents that were never sent out, despite repeated entreaties from the minority side.

This includes requests for subpoenas to obtain additional testimony from key figures in the probe who Democrats say were not forthcoming enough in interviews — among them Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. Democrats surmise they might have compelled them to return if not for Nunes’s resistance.

Republicans have dismissed such complaints as political posturing. Conaway said that he has received every subpoena approval he has requested from Nunes, while others pointed to the steady stream of witnesses who sat for interviews with the Intelligence Committee — and challenged Democrats to name who they say is missing.


“Adam’s list is pretty much every character in any Dostoevsky or Tolstoy novel,” Gowdy said, referring to the Intelligence panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California. “I get the intrigue and the mystery of these unusual-sounding names, but at some point you have to tie it back to what we’re looking at.”

“You can interview anybody that’s ever met a Russian in the government and it’s not going to get you any closer,” said Rooney. “Ten months, how many witnesses? I want to know, ask them how much longer they want to go. How many more witnesses do they need to hear, and specifically which witnesses, and why?”

But to Democrats, the march of witnesses in and out of the committee’s secure interview facility in the U.S. Capitol building basement has provided little assurance the probe is being run properly.

The packed schedule, sometimes featuring two or three overlapping interviews per day, has sparked complaints from Democrats that it is impossible to fully prepare for or monitor the investigation’s progress. Even when members are able to focus on one witness at a time, people familiar with the probe said, relevant requested documents often fail to materialize until after the interview has concluded — and the interviewees are hardly ever invited back.

The order of interviews has also been a point of ongoing dispute. While Senate Intelligence Committee leaders boast of a methodical process that starts with peripheral players and builds to key witnesses, the House Intelligence Committee’s order is comparatively haphazard and unstructured — almost designed, critics say, to give the probe a “veneer of respectability” while effectively giving investigators whiplash.

Nunes’s hand in such decisions was never direct, people familiar with the probe said. During the period he was under an Ethics Committee investigation, he never once attended a closed-door meeting at which the Russia probe was discussed — something both his allies and critics attest to. But at least one of his senior committee staff members was always present at such sessions to help update members, question witnesses and otherwise run the probe, multiple people said. Even Republicans acknowledge it was difficult to distinguish between staff members’ allegiance to the committee and their loyalties to Nunes.

“I don’t know where his staff ends and HPSCI” begins, Gowdy said, referring to the House Intelligence committee by its official acronym. “Some of them are apolitical nonpartisan members of his staff, and I’m not smart enough to know who’s what.”

Once the House Intelligence Committee concludes its investigation, it is unclear what precise role remains for Nunes in the House GOP’s continued push to investigate allegations of bias and other misconduct in law enforcement. The House Committee on Oversight and the Judiciary Committee have already launched an inquiry into the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe. And a joint investigation by Nunes and Gowdy into the Justice Department and FBI’s review of circumstances surrounding an Obama-era deal giving Russia a stake in the American uranium market seems to have lost its initial momentum.

If there is one aspect of the Russia probe that seems destined to outlast the House Intelligence Committee’s preferred timeline, it is Nunes’s investigation of Fusion GPS, the firm behind a dossier detailing Trump’s alleged connections to Russian officials, financiers and exploits in Moscow. Nunes’s subpoena of the firm’s bank records is caught up in a court battle, and the chairman’s staff is in touch with the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), according to the senator, who is also looking into reports that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party paid for research that ended up in the dossier’s pages.



The dossier continues to be a focus of the president in tweet storms seeking to discredit Mueller’s probe. Most recently, he blasted the FBI for focusing on the “Crooked Hillary pile of garbage” dossier “as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign.” In recent weeks, he has also tweeted encouragement of Nunes’s efforts to unearth information about the dossier from the “deep state.”

Nunes, meanwhile, appears to have made up his mind about the House Intelligence Committee probe into the allegations surrounding Trump and Russia, expressing his convictions in an interview with Fox News.

“We have no evidence of Russia collusion between the Trump campaign” and Russia, Nunes said.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpos ... bee47eded4

[Modernistfan]

It is nearly a year after the inauguration, and the Democrats still absolutely do not get it. The reality is that no one outside the Beltway actually gives a fig about the Russia investigation. Unless the Democrats start coming up with a smart and aggressive economic plan, start telling the truth about Trump's Koch-inspired tax giveaway and what it will actually mean for the economy, start talking to middle-class and working-class residents of states like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and drastically revise their strategy of appealing only to latte liberals in the coastal states and ethnic minorities, they will lose again in 2020. (There has been some chatter about Joe Biden running in 2020--spare us from that superannuated buffoon).
The reality is that nearly all of the tax break to corporations will go to dividends, stock buybacks, and mergers and acquisitions--virtually none of it will go to increased wages or investments in new plant and equipment.
I really don't care if the entire Trump campaign, including the selection of precinct chairmen, was run directly out of the Kremlin. That is a distraction from the real issues..

[lennygoran]

I really don't care if the entire Trump campaign, including the selection of precinct chairmen, was run directly out of the Kremlin. That is a distraction from the real issues..

Disagree-they're not mutually exclusive-I watch CNN alot and they constantly talk about what the rich got for Xmas from the tax bill-still Mueller must continue-I want Jared in jail and eventually Trump impeached. Regards, Len