Devin Nunes's Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret (Esquire)
Rep. Devin Nunes is head of the House Intelligence Committee and one of President Trump’s biggest defenders. For years, he’s spun himself as a straight talker whose no-BS values are rooted in his family’s California dairy farm. So why did his parents and brother cover their tracks after quietly moving the farm to Iowa? Are they hiding something politically explosive? On the ground in Iowa, Esquire searched for the truth—and discovered a lot of paranoia and hypocrisy.
Devin Nunes has a secret. Nunes is the California Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has become famous in the Trump era for using his position as a battering ram to discredit the Russia investigation and protect Donald Trump at all costs, even if it means shredding his own reputation and the independence of the historically nonpartisan committee in the process.
First elected to Congress in 2002, Nunes wasn’t always like this. At one time he was known for his independent streak. When a new class of radical House Republicans pushed its leadership to shut down the government in 2013, Nunes attacked them as “lemmings with suicide vests.” In 2015, during another tumultuous period of House GOP infighting, I interviewed a broad cross section of the chamber’s Republican leadership, and Nunes stood out for comments he made about how his colleagues and constituents were siloed in right-wing echo chambers and increasingly reliant on this or that “conspiracy theory” rather than “something that is mostly true.” In hindsight, he was prescient about the direction of his party: A few years later, a bona fide conspiracy theorist, one who credited Alex Jones with his victory, was elected president.
Instead of continuing the fight, Nunes served on the president’s transition team and became Trump’s most important defender in Congress. He has used the Intelligence Committee to spin a baroque theory about alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign that began with a made-up Trump tweet about how “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.” Indeed, Nunes has worked closely with the White House to investigate the FBI rather than the FSB (the KGB’s successor), most famously by attempting to undermine the Russia investigation by releasing a partisan report—the so-called “Nunes memo”—that cherry-picked evidence to accuse the FBI of bias in its effort to obtain a warrant to monitor the communications of Carter Page, a Trump foreign-policy advisor.
Nunes has always been reliably conservative, but on some issues, he has broken with his party. He has long supported moderate immigration reform, for instance, including amnesty for many undocumented people living and working in the U.?S. But as Trump has instituted a draconian policy of zero tolerance for all undocumented people and argued that every undocumented individual should be deported, Nunes has been silent. More recently, as Trump and the House Republicans have celebrated Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the agency’s aggressive tactics, Nunes has followed suit. On CaRepublican.com—a Nunes-created news site, which mimics the Drudge Report—he now regularly highlights articles attacking Democrats for being insufficiently supportive of ICE’s raids and deportations.
Which brings us back to Nunes’s secret.
Continue reading: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23471864/devin-nunes-family-farm-iowa-california/
= new reply since forum marked as read
captive, like their own cows, by enemies in their own party leadership who've created irrational animosity against liberalism to keep them corralled.
They need an epiphany.
