Those wondering “Where’s Devin?” need wonder no longer. The fair-haired U.S. Representative from California (R) and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee was in Martinsville, Indiana on Friday, April 28, where he was the headliner at the local county GOP’s 2017 Lincoln Day Dinner. In case you haven’t heard of Martinsville (pop. 12,000), the small town has had an outsized reputation as a center of KKK activity; as recently as 1968, a young black woman was brutally murdered while selling encyclopedias there. The crime was not solved until more than three decades later, and no one was prosecuted.
Seated beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Nunes was vehement in his defense of President Donald J. Trump, declaring that “Trump saved this country.” He also reassured his listeners that there was no reason to believe the Russian government attempted to steal the election, or that Trump was working with the Russians during his campaign. Nunes blamed Obama for dropping the ball on Russian hacking, as reported in the Bloomington, IN, Herald Times:
Nunes said that in 2016, he warned the administration of then-President Barack Obama about the intelligence community’s concerns that Russia was trying to get involved in the election and that the administration downplayed the warnings.
“So what happened after that? The Russians were trying to get involved in our election like they do every time. Not just them, other countries do the same thing,” Nunes said.
He said there is no proof the Russian government tried to intervene in the November election.
The discussion turned to foreign policy, and Nunes indirectly praised the Trump administration by turning to another favorite Republican strategy for getting off the hook in an interview: Clinton-Bashing. Given that the world is a mess, Clinton would not have been able to improve things, according to the California Representative:
“Do you think that Hillary Clinton would have, after there was a chemical attack against people in Syria, do you think Hillary Clinton would have launched 50 Tomahawk — 59 Tomahawks and destroyed a bunch of Syrian airplanes?” Nunes said.
Such rhetorical nonsense was well-received in this overwhelmingly-Republican county gathering. One can only imagine what Abe Lincoln might be thinking about all this, but the expression on his face gives us a hint.