Just when you thought Devin Nunes couldn’t be a more transparently pathetic lackey doofus, a new revelation comes out of Washington to add to the skyscraper of evidence that he shouldn’t have a driver’s license, let alone chair the House Intelligence Committee.
After he made a fool of himself and all of the GOP with his dubious “memo” meant to clear Trump from any charges of collusion with Russia (which did exactly the opposite), he demanded to see a highly sensitive DOJ memo that explained the origins of the Russia investigation’s launch in 2016. He made a big show of it, threatening to impeach Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and when he finally got his way… he never read the damn thing.
Per CNN:
But when the pair arrived at the Justice Department to review the electronic communication, officials were caught off-guard by his next move. Nunes -- sitting with a copy of the document in an unopened folder directly in front of him -- opted not to read it, according to four sources with knowledge of the situation.
Asked twice in recent days if he personally had read the document that he demanded detailing the start of the Russia probe, Nunes pointedly refused to answer.
"You know I don't talk about committee business," he told CNN.
Asked later for a yes-or-no answer, Nunes repeated the same refrain: "You know I don't talk to you about this stuff."
A Nunes spokesman also would not say if his boss read the documents he's demanded from the department.
This should surprise no one — Nunes has a long history of being fabulously ignorant about the sensitive issues that he has a responsibility to study. He is the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a depressingly ironic title for someone as stupid and uninformed as him. A
recent New York Times article lays out some of his biggest sins and bizarre obsessions, which include conspiracy theories and valuable time wasted.
According to three people familiar with the log, during Nunes’s first several years on the committee, he rated as its “least read” member. He had a similarly poor record of visiting the intelligence agencies for briefings. His lack of preparation could be seen in the committee’s classified hearings, where, according to a former committee staff member, Nunes often seemed out of his depth. “The committee gets to ask direct questions of the C.I.A. director for two hours a quarter, and if a member is using up half his time on questions that he should already know the answers to, it’s not very productive,” the former staff member says.
Even worse, in the eyes of some of committee members and staff, was how Nunes did get his information. “He’d go out to these hinterlands and run into security guys there, and they’d give him crazy ideas,” the former committee staff member says. “He wasn’t discerning. These guys might have something interesting that’s one piece of the whole puzzle, but he’d think whatever they had to say was the whole truth.” Then, when Nunes brought back that information to Washington and intelligence officials would try to put it in context for him — or correct any misinformation — he would become suspicious. “He didn’t take people at face value,” a former government official recalls, “and didn’t always believe leadership.”
Even weirder was his desperate need to utilize a random Portuguese island in the Atlantic that holds no advantage for the US. It’s too long to quote, but you HAVE to read the Times story — it reveals so much about just how insane and irresponsible he is.
Luckily, Democrats have an incredible candidate challenging him in
Andrew Janz. He’s a prosecutor in central California, and he’s run a brilliant campaign, both in his fundraising and his pointed — and often funny — challenging of Nunes. Intellectually, they’re night and day, and Janz is very progressive for a very red area. Janz has put up
billboards taunting the Republican and blasted Nunes’ failures
over social media and on TV, and shown more in his year of campaigning than Nunes has in his decade-plus in office.
Imagine taking Devin Nunes down. Yes, he’s in a pretty red district, but he’s being destroyed in the press, and his credibility is long since gone, even with his voters. If Democrats are to take back the House, we need to win races like this — and overthrowing Devin Nunes would be the crown jewel in this #bluewave election.