Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is threatening to go after career FBI officials who investigated Trump and his campaign’s misdeeds during the 2016 election, telling Fox News on Sunday that he’s planning to file eight “criminal referrals” to the Department of Justice against unnamed investigators.
Nunes gave few specifics, including no names and no actual evidence of possible crimes that were committed by these officials.
But the “referrals” seem to hinge on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants issued against members of Trump’s campaign.
Trump sycophants, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), have homed in on these FISA warrants by creating ridiculous conspiracies that they say somehow violated Trump campaign members’ privacy. It’s a sad attempt to distract from the 199 criminal charges against 37 people — five of whom have been sentenced to prison — that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team secured.
It also appears to be part of the GOP’s desire to exact revenge against those who investigated the many alleged crimes of the Trump campaign by claiming the investigation was somehow illegal or, as Trump has repeatedly claimed, a “hoax.”
However, criminal referrals from a single member of Congress — such as the ones Nunes says he intends to make — are completely toothless and carry no legal weight.
Politico’s Kyle Cheney said Nunes’ referral is no different than a “press release” as it carries “no force of law” and that “especially in this case, DOJ already has all the info that Congress could possibly refer.”
In other words, this is likely to amount to nothing.
The move instead looks like a desperate stunt by Nunes to remain relevant now that he is in the House minority and no longer has the ability to play defense for Trump at the helm of the House Intelligence Committee.
This is not the first stunt Nunes has pulled since becoming a member of the minority.
Nunes filed an asinine lawsuit against Twitter and two Twitter users who he said, in layman’s terms, were being mean to him.
One of those accounts, “Devin Nunes’ cow,” went from having almost no followers to now having more than 645,000. That’s far more than the 427,000 followers Nunes’ own Twitter account has. What a spectacular fail.
Nunes has also been leading the charge to keep the Mueller report private, saying the report should be burned up before the public has a chance to read it. That doesn’t sound like someone who is confident that the report is a “total exoneration” of Trump and his campaign.
And in another ridiculous act, he called on Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — who is helping expose the criminality of Trump and his team — to resign from his role as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes wrote in a letter that because Mueller’s report exonerates Trump of collusion (which no one actually knows is true or not given that no one has seen Mueller’s report), that Schiff should step down.
Ultimately, Nunes is showing that he’s desperate for attention and relevance. No one should give him that pleasure.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
