By now there’s no avoiding the necessity of all sorts of official investigations into the widespread suspicions that the campaign of now-President Donald Trump colluded with Russian efforts to affect the past election, as well as the Trump administration’s various and variously credible counter-claims of all sorts of still-ongoing Democratic skullduggery, but at this point we think its best for everyone if they don’t involve California’s Republican Rep. Devin Nunes.
Nunes is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which puts him squarely in the middle of this very muddy mess, but thus far he’s only the muddied the situation even further. He was an advisor to the Trump transition team, then issued a joint statement with the top Democratic committee member that they were looking for “any intelligence regarding links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns.” After President Trump issued a series of early-morning “tweets” alleging that President Barack Obama had ordered “wiretapping” of his home in Trump Tower Nunes told the press “I don’t think we should attack the president for ‘tweeting,'” but when the White House press secretary took care to note that “wiretapping” was said in quotes and could therefore mean just about anything from improper leaks about campaign officials’ calls to people who were being wiretapped and another White House spokeswoman suggested it might have been a spying on Trump through a microwave oven Nunes told the press that “I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower. Clearly the president was wrong,” but insisted that some of Trump’s associated might have been caught up in wiretaps of other individuals, which Trump cited as vindication of “tweets,” and Nunes was compelled to say still didn’t prove the “tweeted” allegations.
Meanwhile, it was all growing muddier even without Nunes’ involvement. The White House press secretary charged that Obama had used a British intelligence agency to do the very much in quotation marks “wire tapping,” which the British government quite indignantly denied, and Trump himself explained during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that he was relying on the word of a Fox News commentator, so you’d have to talk to Fox about it, and when the rest of the media went to Fox to talk about it they said they couldn’t confirm its commentator’s assertion. Trump’s National Security Advisor resigned after 24 days on the job following revelations about previously-undisclosed contacts but eventually leaked contacts with Russia, Trump’s Attorney General recused himself from the Justice Department’s official investigation after his own previously denied contacts with Russian officials were leaked, and it was also leaked that there was an ongoing investigation into former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s business dealings with Ukrainian politicians linked the to Russian government, as well as a meeting between Trump’s son-in-law and top-advisor with the Russkies that might or might not have had something to do with the son-in-law’s own family real estate business, all of which gave some credibility to Trump’s thus-far-unsubstantied conspiracy theories about a coordinated leaking campaign against his administration.
Although assigned to the unenviable task of making sense of all of this, Nunes proceeded to make it all the more nonsensical. After inviting the FBI to testify that it had no evidence of Obama wire-tapping or otherwise surveilling Trump but was conducting an ongoing investigation about the Trump campaign and administration’s ties to Russia, Nunes told the press that “We know there was no physical wiretap of Trump Tower” but that “it’s still possible that other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.” Shortly after that he made secret visit to White House grounds to conduct what he later explained when it was inevitably found out was an effort to “confirm what I already new” about wiretapping. The next day he held a press conference where he refused to cite any sources or provide any documentation, but boldly asserted that “What I’ve read seems to be some level of surveillance activity — perhaps legal, but I don’t think that it’s right. I don’t know that the American people would be comfortable with what I’ve read,” then repeated that no, Obama didn’t literally tap Trump’s phones. He admitted that he’d brief Trump on this bombshell information he’d learned from the White before he passed it along to his House Intelligence Committee colleagues, Trump told Time Magazine in a bizzar-throughout that he felt “somewhat vindicated” by Nunes’ press conference, which he worried wasn’t getting enough attention, and by that point all the Democrats were calling on Nunes to recuse himself of the rest of this mess and so were some prominent Republicans.
For now Nunes is defying those calls, claiming his critics want him out “Because they know I am effective at getting to the bottom of things,” but for now we’ll have to join in with those prominent Republicans who are calling for his recusal from this whole mess. Even if he were to somehow stumble into the bottom of things, as Inspector Clouseau did in all those “Pink Panther” movies, we can’t imagine anyone believing the ending. Which is too bad for everyone, no matter how this convoluted plot turns out.
By now there’s no avoiding official inquiries widespread suspicions about possible collusion between the Trump campaign with Russian efforts to affect the past election, and if it’s true no true Republican should impede that conclusion, and if it’s not true that conclusively true conclusion should be untainted by any suspicion it was reached by partisan motivations. At this point pretty much everyone including Trump admits that all talk about Obama wire-tapping Trump was quotation-marked and not at all meant literally, and that all that stuff about snoopy microwave ovens was pretty much crazy-talk, but even if you’re paranoid that doesn’t mean that all those leaks haven’t been against you, and even if they were from calls monitored on some Russkie’s lines that happened to pick up some Trump associates that doesn’t necessarily prove anything worth fretting about, and if it doesn’t it would do Trump well to have someone more convincing than Nunes make that case.
Trump was reportedly infuriated after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the ongoing Justice Department investigation into all this mess, as it violated his principle of never of apologizing, but we respect Sessions’ principled and apologetic reasons for doing so and it makes us feel somewhat vindicated for the respect we’d long had for his character. Until recently we’d never heard of Nunes, but if he were to recuse himself of any role in the congressional investigation and similarly bow out of this whole mess he might earn a similar measure of respect. By the end of it we expect that as always the truth will come out and pretty much everyone involved will be implicated, so we intend to stand far enough way enough away from it all to be unsullied by any of the inevitable mud, and at this point we advise whatever’s left of both the Republican and Democratic parties to do the same.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 