Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is once again using his power as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to try to discredit the ongoing investigation into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia.
Nunes told "Fox & Friends" on Sunday that he plans on asking his fellow lawmakers to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over certain classified material related to the Mueller investigation, according to CNN. As he explained to the Fox News hosts, "We're just not going to take this nonsense of every time we peel something back, every time we need information, we get ignored, we get stalled or stonewalled."
There are several concerning dimensions to Nunes' latest action. The first is that, although he has made it sound like he is being simply ignored by the Justice Department, they actually did respond to his request — and explained why the unspecified information he is requesting cannot be easily provided to him.
"Disclosure of responsive information to such requests can risk severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives, damage to relationships with valued international partners, compromise of ongoing criminal investigations, and interference with intelligence activities," Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, who is in charge of the Justice Department's Office of Legislative Affairs, wrote in a letter to Nunes.
Another problematic aspect of Nunes' actions is that he has a history of making requests for documents that he winds up not using.
On Friday CNN reported that Nunes had on several previous occasions threatened to hold Justice Department officials in contempt of Congress for not handing over certain sensitive documents . . . only to not read the materials after his requests were complied with. Nunes later justified not doing so by arguing that Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina had read the documents instead.
Compounding this problem is the fact that Nunes has a long history of hyperpartisan behavior when it comes to the Trump investigation. In April of last year he temporarily recused himself after facing criticism for publicly discussing sensitive matters in order to promote the disproved narrative that Trump's campaign had been spied on by officials from President Barack Obama's White House. In January the Ranking Member on his committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., accused House Republicans of blocking key witnesses from appearing before his committee in an effort to thwart the investigation (the committee later produced a report that claimed Trump had done nothing illegal). By February Nunes was using his clout to not only avoid investigating Trump in good faith but to release a memo that spuriously attempted to cast shade on the investigation by claiming law enforcement had signed off on affidavits that used politically biased evidence.
Finally, there is the fact that Trump's House Republican supporters have developed a disturbing habit of threatening members of the Justice Department in ways that make little legal sense but seem designed to discredit the investigation in the eyes of their supporters. Last week, for instance, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., threatened to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein by using the same tactic employed by Nunes against Sessions — namely, claiming they weren't receiving timely responses to their requests.
As Meadows told The Washington Post at the time, he and his colleagues were dealing with "frustrations about their inability to respond to simple requests [that] could warrant further action." As the Post explained at the time:
The conservatives’ outline, which is divided into eight parts, focuses on Rosenstein and surveillance matters in the first three articles. The document asserts that the veteran Justice Department official “engaged in a pattern of conduct incompatible with the trust and confidence placed in him” in his dealings with Congress and “failed to enforce multiple laws” in the warrant process.
The draft also states that Rosenstein “knowingly provided misleading statements” during congressional testimony about steps the federal government took to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The other major detail of this story is that it reminds us of just how far Sessions has fallen in the estimation of both Trump and his right-wing supporters.
When Trump selected Sessions to be his attorney general, the two were well-known to be close friends as well as political allies. The president later turned against Sessions, not because of any disagreement over policies involving fighting crime, the war on drugs or other important law enforcement issues, but rather because Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.
Not surprisingly, Trump's surrogates have also turned on Sessions for this reason, even though Sessions had previously been a cherished figure on the far right for his unwaveringly conservative views as a United States Senator from Alabama. Aside from Nunes' recent threats toward Sessions, this was most recently demonstrated by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani urging Sessions to end his recusal so that the heat could be taken off of the president, according to a report by Politico from last week:
"This is a completely tainted investigation," Giuliani told host Sean Hannity. Giuliani said that a list of questions Mueller reportedly intends to ask Trump appear "intended to trap him," and denounced his "totally garbage investigation," which he called "an outrageous miscarriage of justice."
Giuliani said Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should shut down Mueller's probe. "The crimes now have all been committed by the government and their agents," he said. Giuliani also accused Mueller of a conflict of interest because, he said, Trump had considered him as a possible replacement for FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired last May.
Nunes' stance on Trump is also causing him political headaches in his home district. Although his California congressional seat is still regarded as "safe Republican," Democratic candidate Deputy District Attorney Andrew Janz managed to raise more than $1 million in the first quarter of 2018, in large part off of the controversy surrounding Nunes' actions on behalf of Trump.
"We feel like he is the one person that is really standing in the way of the (FBI Special Counsel) Robert Mueller investigation. We think people deserve to know what happened to our elections in 2016 and what is happening in 2018. And every day my opponent is out there trying to undermine federal law enforcement, the special prosecutors probe and really working for Trump instead of the American people," Janz told CNN in March.
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