During a weekend appearance on the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures with host Maria Bartiromo, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) melted down over a recent sentence of one year of probation for Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer who doctored an email during the bureau’s effort to secure court approval for surveillance of ex-Trump adviser Carter Page. To be clear: Clinesmith’s action does not in any way meaningfully impact the legitimacy of the Russia investigation as a whole, which did not start because he doctored an email. His action does not automatically represent some kind of systematic conspiracy to target conservatives like Nunes who happen to have a “poor me” complex. Nevertheless, Nunes freaked out.
In a truly bizarre assessment of current circumstances, Nunes said that Clinesmith was “probably still on a binger celebrating with all of his Democratic Party pals” over his supposedly overly lenient sentence. Going on to complain more broadly about the coverage of the Russia scandal and investigation, Nunes petulantly added as follows:
‘What you’re seeing here is the normalization of fake news narrative-building. So, you have political parties that decide that they wanna go out and hire a bunch of people, develop a narrative that you go out and get reporters to go report on, and then the FBI takes it and picks it up and then uses it at the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court to actually make whatever news narrative you want real, and that’s what you’re seeing now… you hear this talk about domestic terrorism. Now they wanna use, after they’ve corrupted it, they now wanna take and make a change so that they turn the entire apparatus of the intelligence agencies on Americans that they don’t like — Americans who maybe voted for Trump.’
Notably, before concluding his remarks, Nunes threw in some random racist disparagement of immigrants. In an amazing feat of paranoid rambling, Nunes added that, according to federal thinking, “if you didn’t vote the way the Left and the socialist and immigrant party wanted, you’re now a domestic terrorist.” Check out his ranting below:
It’s amazing how Nunes talks as though he has some kind of authority while remaining completely detached from the basic reality of the world around him. No, there’s not some kind of federal conspiracy to target Trump voters via government intelligence agencies, and suggesting that federal authorities are applying the “domestic terrorist” label to Trump voters as a whole is ridiculous. Recently, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building, where at least some of them apparently sought to kill leaders like then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). What would Nunes call that behavior, which is what’s actually at issue, if not domestic terrorism?
