About That Presidential Medal of Freedom: Revisiting the Nunes Memo
Devin Nunes speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018. (Gage Skidmore, https://flic.kr/p/F7VaXi; CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)
President Trump last week awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to, of all people, Rep. Devin Nunes. Nunes is the ranking Republican member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and among Congress’s most prolific and consequential conspiracy theorists. In announcing the award on Jan. 4, the president declared that Nunes had “unearth[ed] the crime of the century,” referring to Nunes’s investigations into alleged misconduct by the Obama administration during the 2016 election. As part of this investigation the animating principle behind the award the announcement reads, Nunes “learned that the Obama-Biden administration had issued Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to spy on President Trum
intelligence community as nazis. this is a community that lives up and down. granted this administration is different. these folks understand the key piece of this is making sure that policymakers have the information and intelligence they need. i agree with phil. with regard to carter page, this is the hallmark of the russian intelligence operation where the russians look for somebody and cast a wide net of someone in a position of power or close to power in the united states and then tries to make contact and recruit that person. that is what this is beginning to look like. we are not there yet. this is the kind of thing that looks like what is happening with carter page. steve, quick take on russia s move to delegitimize what happened in syria. put p vladimir putin says they have
taiwan. and the subject of eavesdropping overseas. the u.s. eavesdrops. we know this on both friends and adversaries as part of intelligence collection. it is about more than that. i think the big headline is this. this was a big deal when nunes came out and said the obama administration were doing something wrong here. the president followed up and went further and said i believe susan rice committed a crime. you have democrats and republicans looked at the documents and the request made. they said this is with a national security advisers do. nothing out of the ordinary. nothing illegal. it contradicts nunes, but also the president. this is like the biggest one-two punch trump has taken so f far. the only thing nunes got right was it was broader than russia.