According to The Daily Beast, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as well as Manhattan federal prosecutors, are investigating a breakfast meeting Trump transition advisor and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) attended at Trump International Hotel in DC with Michael Flynn and slew of foreign officials just days before Trump's inauguration.
The breakfast has come under scrutiny by federal prosecutors in Manhattan as part of their probe into whether the Trump inaugural committee misspent funds and if donors tried to buy influence in the White House. The existence of that probe was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The Special Counsel’s Office is also looking at the breakfast as part of its investigation into whether foreigners contributed money to the Trump inaugural fund and PAC by possibly using American intermediaries, as first reported by The New York Times. Robert Mueller’s team has asked Flynn about the event, according to two sources familiar with the Special Counsel’s Office questioning.
Nunes, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, has been perhaps Trump’s most important congressional ally over the last two years. After serving on Trump’s transition team, Nunes became a vigorous defender of the president against federal and congressional inquiries. The California Republican pushed a misleading memo alleging misconduct in the FBI investigation of Trump’s associates that the bureau said contained “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
Now Nunes—a key figure behind the right-wing counter narrative that Trump is at the mercy of a “Deep State” conspiracy—finds at least one meeting that he himself attended under the special counsel’s scrutiny.
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“The fact that the prosecutors are looking at this is part of the whole question of the Trump way of doing business—how it may have given all kinds of foreign powers inroads into the White House,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “These cases are important because they involve possible elements of corruption and could tell us more about the special physics of Trumpworld influence which looks more like what you get in a banana republic.”
And within Trumpworld, there are few players better known for their willingness to “throw themselves on grenade, after grenade, after grenade” in the defense of Trump than Nunes, according to a former senior White House official.
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Soon after the inauguration breakfast, Nunes began a House intelligence committee investigation, ostensibly aimed at the connections between Trump and Russia, that devolved into a mechanism to defend Trump against those investigating the president. Revelations about Nunes’ cooperation with the White House prompted him to leave the investigation in the hands of his GOP colleagues, but Nunes retained subpoena power. The investigation ended last year after Republicans on the committee said they “found no evidence of collusion between President Donald Trump’s associates and the Kremlin.”
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It’s not surprising that Nunes and Flynn found themselves together in the days before the inauguration. Nunes’ links to Flynn are substantial. During the 24-day period when Flynn served as Trump’s national security adviser, Flynn brought one of Nunes’ senior aides, the former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Derek Harvey, onto the staff of the National Security Council. Another former aide to Nunes’ committee, Michael Ellis, went to the White House counsel’s office. Ellis and a third Flynn aide, the NSC intelligence director Ezra Cohen-Watnick, reportedly fed Nunes information that Nunes presented as deriving from intelligence whistleblowers worried about inappropriate “unmasking” of Americans’ names from surveillance intercepts, such as Flynn’s.
Mueller Probes an Event With Nunes, Flynn, and Foreign Officials at Trump’s D.C. Hotel (Daily Beast)