Today, it was reported that the House Intelligence Committee chairman apologized to members of his panel for his bonkers decision to go public with allegations (based on an anonymous source) that the Trump transition team’s communications were “incidentally” surveilled by the U.S. government, without briefing the Democratic members on the committee.
Nunes deservedly received a large amount of backlash for his stunt, especially from ranking committee member Adam Schiff, who stated that Nunes’s actions “throw great doubt into the ability of both the chairman and the committee to conduct the investigation the way it ought to be conducted.” It’s the polite way of saying that in Nunes’s speedy attempt to give Donald Trump political cover (which the administration quickly utilized) he acted like a rat, undermining a lot of his own investigation’s credibility—and, hilariously, increasing the chances of an independent investigation.
Nunes’s strategy seems to be to act first and ask for forgiveness later. However, he is even bad at that—Representative Jackie Speier, a Democratic member of the committee, said that Nunes apologized “in a generic way.”