The New York Times Magazine has published an extraordinary piece about House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), a member of the Trump transition team, who, in his role as chairman of the committee, used his leadership position to derail and ultimately prematurely end the Russia investigation.
The Trump team was so impressed with Nunes that, according to the transition official, it considered bringing him into the administration. A few weeks after the election, the congressman traveled to Trump Tower, where, according to transition officials, he and Trump discussed the possibility of his becoming the director of national intelligence and overseeing an ambitious reorganization of the intelligence community. But Trump ultimately decided to shelve those plans and appoint as director a less disruptive figure, Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator. Besides, with Pompeo leaving Capitol Hill for Langley, Trump’s circle believed that Nunes would be even more valuable to the administration if he remained in Congress, running the Intelligence Committee.
Some 17 months later, that looks to have been a remarkably prescient decision — as Trump appears to have been able to influence Nunes to a remarkable degree. So much so that during Trump’s time in the White House, Nunes has transformed the Intelligence Committee into a beachhead from which to rally his fellow Republicans in support of the president against his perceived enemies — not just the Democratic Party but also the F.B.I., the Department of Justice and the entire intelligence community.
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The White House has certainly appreciated Nunes’s efforts. “Only Mark Meadows,” the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, “has a stronger relationship with Trump,” the former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon says of Nunes. “Nunes’s relationship with Trump is that strong.” And what makes Nunes an especially strong — and effective — ally for Trump is that they share a worldview. Both men have long considered themselves outsiders doing battle with a corrupt, rigged system.
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... Nunes has all but destroyed what was once the House Intelligence Committee’s greatest asset. When the committee was being created in 1977, to exercise legislative oversight of American intelligence agencies, Speaker Tip O’Neill pledged, “This is a nonpartisan committee; there will be nothing partisan about its deliberations.” Although that goal was occasionally tested, the spirit of nonpartisanship generally prevailed and at times even flourished, as it had under Nunes’s predecessor, Mike Rogers, and his Democratic counterpart, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland. “It’s not like Dutch and Mike weren’t stalwarts of their own parties, but they knew they had a national security mission,” says Jamil Jaffer, a Republican lawyer who was a senior counsel on the committee. “They got together and said, ‘Look, this stuff is too important to screw up.’ ”
But since Nunes’s midnight run, the committee has been crippled by partisan fighting.
The piece goes on to describe Nunes' fierce loyalty without regard for context or facts, his preference for conspiracy theories over intelligence briefings, his penchant for indulging deep-seated suspicions and running down dead-end leads, and his obsession with the Azores, "the semiautonomous Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."
Read the full piece: How Devin Nunes Turned the House Intelligence Committee Inside Out (The New York Times Magazine)