Year of Vindication, Part 4: Devin Nunes

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, in Washington on Oct. 28, 2019. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Commentary

For revealing what he knew about the highly unusual surveillance on the transition team of a newly elected president, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was forced to step down from his position as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) while he was being investigated.

After he was cleared of having leaked classified information and restored to his chairmanship, people in politics and the news media set out to destroy him and his family as he stubbornly continued investigating the greatest political scandal in modern history.

For more than three years, top political elites in this country insisted he was a wild conspiracy theorist, a crook—if not an outright traitor to his country—and a tool of the Russians.

Nevertheless, he persisted.

In the end, as he always had faith it would, vindication arrived for Nunes.

Nunes has been the congressman for California’s 22nd District since 2003. He chaired the HPSCI from 2015 to 2018, before losing the gavel to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

It’s safe to say that not many people in U.S. history have been vilified and smeared for telling the truth about very serious issues of great national interest the way Nunes has been, since he blew the lid off the spying scandal at a press conference in Washington in March 2017.

It was there that Nunes revealed that members of the incoming president’s transition team had been spied on by the outgoing Obama administration.

At the time, it was successfully downplayed by portraying the surveillance of Trump transition people as being “incidental” and not deliberate.

Many people would have given up by now and told themselves it just wasn’t worth it. They would have said, as the long months slowly slid by, that the cost of fighting to get the truth out was too much for them and their family to bear.

But Nunes didn’t quit; he knew what was at stake in this scandal, and he was determined to bring it to light despite all the pressure.

Our very country was at stake. And I thank God that a patriot such as Nunes was there to stand in the breach and sound the alarm when the fate of our Republic hung in the balance.

Some will never accept Nunes’s vindication, of course; the hate and lies have warped their minds. One example of the brainwashing level of bias that Nunes has faced is Wikipedia.

The current Wikipedia page about Nunes is an utter joke. The people managing that page should be ashamed of themselves. If you read that website, you wouldn’t be aware Nunes has been completely vindicated on his assertions about the following:

1. There was no Trump–Russia election collusion evidence, as both the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller as well as the FISA abuse report by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz demonstrated.
2. The FBI suppressed exculpatory evidence and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve a FISA spy warrant, including three renewals of the warrant, on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Two of those warrants have been ruled illegal and the other two are under review. Nowhere is this mentioned on Wikipedia’s page discussing Nunes’s involvement with the FISA matter.
3. There was indeed unmasking that took place by officials in the Obama administration of incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, and perhaps other Trump transition team officials as well. Acting Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Richard Grenell just last week released a list of specific officials who were involved in the unmasking of Flynn.

For the past week, much of the attention in Washington concerning the Spygate scandal has revolved around Grenell declassifying and publicly releasing a list of particular Obama administration officials who made unmasking requests on Flynn.

Here’s what I suspect happened: the Obama administration wasn’t only spying on and unmasking the electronic communications of Flynn but also other members of the Trump transition team. I don’t think Nunes called a press conference just because he was shown Flynn conversing with then-Russian Ambassador Kislyak.

Do you remember who was on that Trump transition team?

Nunes was, so was Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump.

And of course, Donald J. Trump himself.

It looks increasingly as if Obama officials weren’t only spying on Trump’s incoming national security adviser but might have also intercepted and unmasked the communications of the incoming attorney general and the chairman of the HPSCI—a congressman who is also a member of the Gang of Eight.

Nunes stressed, when he revealed the unmasking that took place, that nowhere in these transcripts were transition team members talking to Russians or discussing Russia, foreign policy, or matters relating to intelligence. So why were these communications being intercepted, transcribed, and then unmasked by high-level Obama officials in the first place?

I believe we will soon know.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion ... But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.