Being an ally of President Donald Trump only gets more tenuous as time goes on. This weekend during a phoned-in appearance on Fox, longtime Trump shill and California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes melted down over the drop of the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which he hadn’t even seen yet at the time of his remarks.
He ranted:
‘The Mueller report — a lot of people are like oh what does it say? We can just burn it up. It is a partisan document, so there’s going to be a lot of calls for that. The Democrats are going to say oh, we need the underlying information. What we really need to see is what was the FBI’s involvement was Fusion GPS? Who did they know about?.. Fusion GPS was essentially the Hillary Clinton campaign.’
No they weren’t. Fusion GPS is the research firm responsible for the infamous Trump dossier, a collection of allegations about the president’s team’s connections to Russia compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. Although they were paid by the Clinton campaign at one point, they completed their work as an entity completely separate from the campaign, and they were even at one point early on supported by a Republican firm.
Watch Nunes ignore the facts below:
Devin Nunes tells Fox & Friends that Mueller’s report should be burned and that Trump’s DOJ should instead launch an investigation of the Obama administration. pic.twitter.com/V7GREE56dI
— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) March 24, 2019
Trump and his allies have long insinuated that federal authorities were inappropriately in bed with Fusion GPS, concealing the political nature of their evidence and using it to launch the years-long Russia investigation that has now concluded. However, that hardly tells the whole story. For one, the allegations were not the only catalyst for the Russia investigation — former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos’s confession of knowledge of stolen emails and even the president’s eventual own behavior also got and kept the ball rolling. Investigators were deeply concerned after Trump abruptly fired FBI Director and Russia investigation leader James Comey and kickstarted a counterintelligence probe of the president under the broader’s investigation’s wing to determine whether he was working on Russia’s behalf even while in office.
If Nunes wants answers about investigators’ behavior, he should look to the president and his many associates who have been caught in covert interactions with key Russians. He won’t.
It’s fitting that if you look closely at his remarks, Nunes pretty much explicitly decried the search for information. He doesn’t want the facts of the probe like the Democrats are after — he wants a gotcha moment.
To that end, he went so far as to suggest that a second special counsel to investigate the first special counsel could have been a good idea at one point, although he says he’ll now stick to trusting Attorney General William Barr to handle the supposed fire-worthy Russia investigation.
What obscene level has the GOP stooped to when one of their leaders calls for a trove of information to be sent up in smoke on national television? It’s like they’re not even trying to hide their cherrypicking of relevant information anymore. The guy suing Twitter for hundreds of millions of dollars because a couple of satirical accounts were mean to him wants us to trust his choices.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
