Devin Nunes Can’t Stop Humiliating Himself on National Television
Devin Nunes, an unremarkable California legislator who has improbably become one of Donald Trump's most important allies in Congress thanks to his inability to feel shame, took to Fox News this morning to continue his full-throated defense of The Memo. By any objective standard, it did not go well. Since it took place on Fox News, however, it won't matter.
Nunes began by repeating the same logically bankrupt line of reasoning he's been pushing for weeks: "The Democrats and the Hillary campaign paid for dirt," he urged, "that the FBI then used to get a warrant on an American citizen to spy on another campaign." It is an argument that ignores, among many other things too numerous to list here, that the Russia investigation was already under way when the Bureau sought a FISA warrant on Trump campaign official Carter Page; that FISA judges have authorized the renewal of the Page warrant three separate times since; and that the FBI disclosed to the FISA judge that some of its information came from a politically motivated source. Incredibly, the Republican Party's continued treatment of opposition research—a fundamental component of every political campaign in modern American history—as evidence of an intricate Deep State plot to take down Donald Trump somehow doesn't even crack a top-ten list of its most disingenuous talking points.
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From there, Nunes moved on to his Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, whose own memo on the subject of the FISA warrant Nunes has steadfastly refused to release to the public. His response is some version of the old "I'm like rubber, you're like glue" rhyme, except without the rhetorical flourish.
Mr. Schiff knows that he's spreading a false narrative there, but that's not new for him. He's spread a false narrative the entire time. The Democrats were well aware that I did not leak information, however, for a year they stayed quiet and advocated for my removal from the Committee. And why is that? It's because we've been successful at getting to the bottom of real problems in the institutions of our government. There's no question [the Democrats] want me gone, but whatever they accuse you of doing is what they're doing.
Later, on the subject of the role of admitted criminal George Papadopoulos in attracting the attention of law enforcement, Nunes dismissed such concerns by stating that "as far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who Trump was—never even met with the president." One minor problem with this assertion is that the president of the United States has tweeted photographic evidence of himself meeting with, among others, George Papadopoulos! (Fox News elected not to highlight this particular exchange on social media, for some reason.)
The most telling line, however, came toward the end of the segment. "It actually helps—we actually enjoy the criticism," Nunes explained. "When you're being criticized by all the major networks, and being attacked by the left, we know that we're getting close to the truth."
Herein lies the fundamental problem with The Memo, and the Russia investigation, and everything else Donald Trump says and does, really: Fox News is a machine that quietly and efficiently filters out any information that might portray the president in a negative light. The reason Nunes can make a demonstrably false claim on national television like this is because he knows that no one at the network will even ask him a hard question, let alone have the audacity to fact-check him. Making a few vague allusions to the lamestream media and "the left" is all he has to do to earn knowing nods from the likes of Brian Kilmeade, who solemnly muttered, "He's taking the fire" as Nunes, his battle-weary brother-in-arms, signed off. This pitch-perfect performance for an audience of one—the most powerful Fox & Friends viewer in the world—did not go unnoticed.
Facts only matter if Americans are able to hear them, process them, and make their own judgments about what they mean. And as Fox News has ably demonstrated, when it comes to information that doesn't fit its preferred narrative, it will simply act as if that information doesn't exist.
