Newsweek's Jeff Stein examines House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes' (R-CA) affection for and close ties to former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the Russia investigation, as an explanation for why the congressman continues to defend the Trump administration instead of working to find out how Russia meddled in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power.
... Nunes was in awe of Flynn, who had won praise for revolutionizing the hunt for terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This guy was one of the best intelligence officers in several generations,” Nunes told me in a December 23, 2016 interview. “I don't know if you've ever met him, but Flynn is extremely smart. He really is top notch.”
Nunes was speaking fives months after Flynn had startled many former military officers by leading “Lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention. It was also two years after the Obama White House has forced Flynn’s resignation as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “What happened,” Nunes told me, “is...he went out and said a lot of things that Obama didn't like…”
But that’s not close to the full story on Flynn, whose battlefield talents didn’t transfer well to running the DIA from 2012 to 2014. Not only were his executive skills lacking, according to many observers, including former Army general and Secretary of State Colin Powell, he quickly developed a reputation for indulging in conspiracy theories—or “Flynn facts,” his aides derisively called them.
But Nunes embraced them.
Stein explains how Nunes' habit of chasing those conspiracy theories helped solidify his relationship with Flynn and how the two men remain connected.
Nunes and Flynn evidently maintained close ties through the election and beyond, even as Flynn’s world was beginning to unravel with questions about his payments from Kremlin mouthpiece Russia Today, secret talks with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and a confidential lobbying contract with a law firm tied to Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “I talk to Flynn virtually everyday, if not multiple times a day,” Nunes told me in the late December 2016 interview. “Seldom there's a day that goes by that I don't talk to Flynn, and especially right after the campaign, directly.”
(...)
In an unusually partisan step, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who was supposed to be leading an investigation into Russian subversion and Team Trump, anointed himself one of the administration’s leading defenders. Trump and and Flynn, he opined, were “so busy” that they wouldn’t have had time to discuss talking to Kislyak.
(...)
Longtime observers of congressional oversight called such activism on behalf of an administration unprecedented. Partisanship has waxed and waned over the years at HPSCI, depending on who held the gavel, said former senior CIA official Larry Pfeiffer, but “we saw nothing compared with what we are seeing with Chairman Nunes, he told Newsweek.
Full story: NUNES MEMO REVEALS CONGRESSMAN’S PENCHANT FOR CONSPIRACY THEORIES (Newsweek)