February 4, 2018
What Nunes achieved - and what's next
By Monica Showalter
House intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes achieved something unprecedented:
Because the memo he wrote, summing up the results of his congressional investigation, pretty well pries the lid off Big Government and Deep State, revealing for all of us how these tyrannical, opposite-of-justice, operations work.
The angry tweets of President Trump didn't do it. The efforts of Republicans in past administrations didn't do this. The change point was Nunes.
The Nunes memo proved the politicization of the FBI at its top levels, and now opens the question of whether we citizens should want it that way, or maybe we need new laws.
But just to get a whiff of the 'wow' factor here, recall how hard, impossible, actually, it was to get any justice for Tea Partiers after the Internal Revenue Service illegally targeted them for special enforcement. The man running the IRS when much of that was going on, including the destruction of emails from the hyper-partisan officials involved in it, Commissioner John Koskinen, retired last year with his full pension. The IRS official who did the dirty work, Lois Lerner, head of the tax-exempt division, took the Fifth in congressional testimony to protect herself from self-incrimination, which is something only crooks do. Then she retired with her full multi-million-dollar pension out in the tony Washington suburbs, getting off scot-free.
Reforming government is always hard. Just think how hard it is to reform Mexico's PEMEX and maybe the scope of this comes clear. Special interests, people whose noses are in the trough, and whose rice bowls are threatened, are always ready to fight back. And efforts to get results, up until Nunes got his memo out, have always failed.
It makes matters even worse because we basically live in a Democrat-run power structure, and it's always o.k. when the left turns government or justice into a partisan instrument, at least to about half the members of Congress, considering the lengths it goes to to protect Gitmo detainees and cop killers from the long arm of the law. It shows how far our system has fallen.
Yet impartial justice is paramount to having a system worth living in. That Nunes was able to break through the sludge of ages with the summary in his memo really does make him one for the history books.
With the facts the Nunes memo established, the door is now open to finding out evern more of what we need to know.
Here are some things that may come of it if the investigation goes on:
And here, Devin Nunes, a congressmember derided by the left for the crime of, heavens, being a "dairy farmer" achieved this by digging and digging, working to break the logjam and expose the problem through all the testimonies taken and research conducted as the catcalls went on.
(Bad things, by the way, happen to people who belittle farmers.)
Why does Congress do with these investigations? They're not done because they can bust anybody, they don't have those powers, though they might spur lawmen to take action. These investigations are one so that facts can be established to create the criteria for making laws. Nunes's role here worked exactly as it should have, and the obvious follow-on reforms are now really possible.
It's a tremendous achievement.
What Nunes achieved - and what's next
By Monica Showalter
House intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes achieved something unprecedented:
Because the memo he wrote, summing up the results of his congressional investigation, pretty well pries the lid off Big Government and Deep State, revealing for all of us how these tyrannical, opposite-of-justice, operations work.
The angry tweets of President Trump didn't do it. The efforts of Republicans in past administrations didn't do this. The change point was Nunes.
The Nunes memo proved the politicization of the FBI at its top levels, and now opens the question of whether we citizens should want it that way, or maybe we need new laws.
But just to get a whiff of the 'wow' factor here, recall how hard, impossible, actually, it was to get any justice for Tea Partiers after the Internal Revenue Service illegally targeted them for special enforcement. The man running the IRS when much of that was going on, including the destruction of emails from the hyper-partisan officials involved in it, Commissioner John Koskinen, retired last year with his full pension. The IRS official who did the dirty work, Lois Lerner, head of the tax-exempt division, took the Fifth in congressional testimony to protect herself from self-incrimination, which is something only crooks do. Then she retired with her full multi-million-dollar pension out in the tony Washington suburbs, getting off scot-free.
Reforming government is always hard. Just think how hard it is to reform Mexico's PEMEX and maybe the scope of this comes clear. Special interests, people whose noses are in the trough, and whose rice bowls are threatened, are always ready to fight back. And efforts to get results, up until Nunes got his memo out, have always failed.
It makes matters even worse because we basically live in a Democrat-run power structure, and it's always o.k. when the left turns government or justice into a partisan instrument, at least to about half the members of Congress, considering the lengths it goes to to protect Gitmo detainees and cop killers from the long arm of the law. It shows how far our system has fallen.
Yet impartial justice is paramount to having a system worth living in. That Nunes was able to break through the sludge of ages with the summary in his memo really does make him one for the history books.
With the facts the Nunes memo established, the door is now open to finding out evern more of what we need to know.
Here are some things that may come of it if the investigation goes on:
- Which judge authorized the FISA warrant and would he have changed his decision had he known the withheld facts or was he as partisan and rigged as his FBI petitioners? Should we be concerned about the fairness and impartiality of judges in FISA investigations, or do we need another law to scrap the whole thing?
- What was the role of Columbia Professor Daniel Richman in the James Comey memos he leaked to the press and was the aim to appoint Bob Mueller as Special Counsel? A look at those Comey memos and some congressional grilling of Richman ought to uncover whether the entire Special Counsel appointment was really about suspicions Russian collusion at all or had something different in mind.
- How was Mueller picked?
- Was the FBI completely motivated by leftist partisan efforts to unseat Trump as president, or did it have other Deep State aims such as opposing Trump's interest in rapprochement with Russia as a threat to its rice bowl of counterintelligence investigations?
- Should indictments from the Mueller investigation be thrown out of court for prosecutorial misbehavior uncovered with the Nunes memo, same as any dirty-cop or dirty-prosecutor misbehavior?
- Which journalists got paid by Steele Dossier paymaster Fusion GPS and are there laws that need to be altered on account of that behavior.
And here, Devin Nunes, a congressmember derided by the left for the crime of, heavens, being a "dairy farmer" achieved this by digging and digging, working to break the logjam and expose the problem through all the testimonies taken and research conducted as the catcalls went on.
(Bad things, by the way, happen to people who belittle farmers.)
Why does Congress do with these investigations? They're not done because they can bust anybody, they don't have those powers, though they might spur lawmen to take action. These investigations are one so that facts can be established to create the criteria for making laws. Nunes's role here worked exactly as it should have, and the obvious follow-on reforms are now really possible.
It's a tremendous achievement.
