Devin Nunes is under a lot of fire from Democrats who are questioning his motives and just held a short presser as he was headed to a health care meeting and told the reporters that yesterday he made a judgement call to take news straight to Trump before going to the committee:
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes says it was “a judgment call” to brief Pres. Trump https://t.co/0dmWLBkbdy https://t.co/mZ56w23APj
— CNN (@CNN) March 23, 2017
Nunes says he didn’t show committee members what he saw because he doesn’t actually have the reports. Apparently he was invited to only see the reports yesterday. But at least now he knows what to ask for to be given to his committee.
So when you hear Democrats on the committee chomping at the bit saying this new information isn’t really new, they don’t actually know if it is or not because they haven’t seen it.
The reporter asked if Trump was behind this new information but Nunes wouldn’t reveal his sources for the obvious reasons, pointing out that if he does that then no one else will come forward. Convenient, but makes sense.
Nunes suggests he’s hoping to know more tomorrow on all of this so hopefully it won’t take that long to verify his claims.
My own take on all of this is that I think it’s ok to be cautious about this, as Nunes is a partisan and a Trump supporter. But in my opinion Nunes has been nothing less than a class act throughout this entire ‘wire tapped’ debacle. When Trump started this whole thing, Nunes came out quickly and said that he had seen no evidence of Trump’s claim that Obama had Trump Tower ‘wire tapped’. He didn’t rush to Trump’s defense. He did however say on multiple occasions he had suggested that he was concerned about potential incidental collection of Trump Team communications, as we saw with Mike Flynn, which gives some credence to the fact that he’s now saying there is evidence of this.
If he had conducted himself as a partisan hack like Schiff, especially in the FBI hearing, then I would be far more skeptical of Nunes motives. But at the moment I just don’t see that on his part.
Thus, if Nunes says he saw Trump communications unmasked inappropriately that were collected in foreign intelligence reports, I believe him and will wait for the evidence.