His bizarre press conference last week raised a host of questions: Why did the chair of the House Intelligence Committee rush to the White House to claim that the government had “incidentally” collected some of the Trump team’s communications in 2016? Why did he insist that these communications had nothing to do with the Trump team’s suspected ties to Russia, or Trump’s claim that he had been “wiretapped” by the Obama administration? Why did Nunes keep other members of the House Intelligence Committee in the dark? Why wouldn’t Nunes identify his source, especially after spending much of Monday haranguing FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Mike Rogers about anonymous sources leaking to the press? And what motivated him to hold the press conference, which damaged his already broken credibility as an impartial investigator and further emboldened those calling for an independent probe?
Over the weekend, more information emerged about the series of events that culminated in Nunes’s press conference. Nunes reportedly made a secret trip to the White House the evening before the press conference—the suspicion was that he went there to meet his source. On Monday, he confirmed that he went there but claimed he only did so “in order to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source.” He told Bloomberg he went to the White House because it was convenient: “We don’t have networked access to these kinds of reports in Congress,” Nunes said. But this is not true: As Jake Sherman reported on MSNBC today, there are secure facilities in the Capitol.
Nunes is saying that the optics are bad, and that is all there is to the story. Certainly, secretly visiting the White House while investigating the White House doesn’t look very good! Whatever the intention of his meeting or of the subsequent press conference, he’s bungled this situation. On Monday, Chuck Schumer upped the pressure and called on Paul Ryan to replace Nunes as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee—a new tactic and an escalation of previous calls for an independent commission.