Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (MOTTO: “Searching for Intelligence in the House of Representatives Since 1977”), contributed his best effort yesterday to the ongoing Republican war on objective reality. With the White House facing Congressional investigation over alleged Trump campaign ties to Russia and over President Trump’s thus-far completely unsupported accusation that the Obama administration eavesdropped on his campaign/transition team’s communications, Nunes learned a shocking fairly mundane bit of information and immediately took it to his committee for investigation ran to brief the White House and then helped them use this information to publicly obfuscate the investigations.
What Nunes found out–possibly based on “evidence” he was given by the Trump administration itself–was that members of Trump’s transition team did have some of their communications intercepted after the election. This obviously relates, but only superficially, to Trump’s allegations that his people were being spied upon by the Obama administration, which has gotten folded into the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the Russia/election story. Given that Trump is the focus of that investigation, and Nunes is supposed to be the lead investigator, his decision to relay this information to the Trump White House, and then to the media, before the other members of his own committee was telling, to say the least.
Naturally, Trump later used Nunes’s information to claim he was vindicated on his wiretapping charges, but the truth is that one has nothing to do with the other. Some Trump communications may have been collected by the NSA because they involved foreign leaders, and the NSA works very hard to collect any communications involving foreign leaders. Nothing in what Nunes found actually supports the claim that Trump or his people were being wiretapped. Even Nunes isn’t really saying that it does, instead falling back on pedantic bullshit when asked if the Obama administration was spying on Trump’s transition: “It all depends on one’s definition of spying.” In fact, although he said he’d found evidence that Trump “communications” were collected, it now seems that what Nunes actually found was that conversations related to Trump were collected–or, in other words, that the NSA had captured conversations in which people in Trump’s circle were discussed, but didn’t participate themselves. If that’s all Nunes found, then it literally says nothing whatsoever about Trump’s spying claims.
(There may be– I say may be, because it seems like a bad idea to just trust Nunes on this–a problem with how the NSA/intelligence community handled whatever it collected. Information about Americans that’s picked up in this kind of surveillance is supposed to be “masked” absent probable cause, and that may not have been properly handled in this case. But that still doesn’t have anything to do with the accusation that Trump’s people were being directly monitored.)
But we’ve seen this game played out many times now, enough times to know that it doesn’t matter that Nunes still says there’s no evidence that the government wiretapped the Trump transition. It doesn’t matter that Nunes now says he probably shouldn’t have run to the White House and then the nearest TV camera with this information before he went back to the committee he’s supposed to be running. It doesn’t matter that to any objective observer, Devin Nunes has now shown that he’s incapable of investigating the Trump administration. All that matters is that the right-wing gaslighting Wurlitzer got enough fuel to keep churning out disinformation until the next big story breaks and knocks this one out of the public consciousness.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 