The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said reports that he met with ex-Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin in Vienna last year were false, but declined to elaborate in an interview on Fox News.Parnas’s attorney, Joseph Bondy, told The Washington Post that Shokin informed Parnas that he had met with Nunes in Vienna in December 2018.
Tag: Devin Nunes
Donald Trump and his insane clown posse
Chaos is a pit, the all-knowing eunuch Lord Varys warns in Game of Thrones, “a gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.”
The conniving Peter Baelish, known as Littlefinger, disagrees: “Chaos isn’t a pit,” he replies. Too few realize, he says, that, “Chaos is a ladder… Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”
What does this tell us, other than the fact that earlier this year I binge-watched Game of Thrones? Well, reflect on Littlefinger’s cynical opportunism and see how the GOP has degenerated into a party of Littlefingers, lying and scheming for no other reason than to keep climbing the ladder for the power, stature and money they believe it signifies. Rung after rung, the Rudy Giulianis, the Lindsay Grahams and Jim Jordans and Devin Nunes try to rise, blindly willing and in obeisant lockstep behind a maniac, not realizing that at the top there is nothing but a long fall down to their own moral destruction.
The road to expulsion: Here’s a timeline of Devin Nunes’ clandestine operations on the House Intelligence Committee
News that Devin Nunes has been sitting through the House impeachment inquiry, pretending to act as a investigator, while actually being an active participant in the scandal might be more shocking if this was the first time. Or the second. But the history of Devin Nunes’ time on the House Intelligence Committee is one that features a nearly unbroken streak of lies, corruption, and plain old idiocy.
As the machinery of the House cranks toward an another inevitable appearance of Nunes before the Ethics Committee—and Fox News opens up 10,000 hours of programming devoted to explaining why it’s perfectly okay for the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee to be traveling the world on the taxpayer dime, actively soliciting corrupt former officials for manufactured dirt that can be deployed in the 2020 election—here’s a little reminder that Double-Naught Nunes was never less than crooked. And ridiculous.
Mar 21, 2017 — Nunes leaps from an Uber car at a stoplight, leaving behind a senior Intelligence Committee staffer without explanation and disappears into the night. Nunes swaps to another car, travels somewhere, and shows up hours later to tell Paul Ryan he has uncovered evidence supporting Donald Trump’s claims that President Obama “spied” on him.
View the complete November 24 article by Mark Sumner from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.
Watch: Eric Swalwell calls out Devin Nunes’ own ties to the Ukraine scandal to his face
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif, called out Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., on Thursday over his links to an indicted associate of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani who assisted with the effort to pressure Ukraine into launching investigations to help President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
Swalwell cited a Daily Beast report that Giuliani business partner Lev Parnas helped Nunes arrange meetings in Europe while the former House Intelligence Committee chairman led an investigation seeking to undermine former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia at Thursday’s impeachment hearing.
His comments came after Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, hit out at Republicans on the committee who have pushed a conspiracy theory welcomed by Trump that Ukraine framed Russia in the 2016 election meddling case, which she said “clearly advance[d] Russian interests.”“Dr. Hill, you cautioned us on the dangers of members of this committee perhaps peddling any Ukrainian conspiracy theories that could benefit Russia,” Swalwell said. “I want to ask you if you’ve heard the name Lev Parnas, of Ukraine, someone in this investigation who was influencing President Trump and Rudy Giuliani about some of the debunked conspiracy theories you referenced,” he added, referring to a baseless George Soros-linked conspiracy theory that led to the ouster of former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
View the complete November 22 article by Igor Derysh from Salon on the AlterNet website here.
GOP hypocrisy and impeachment hearings: Lindsey Graham and Devin Nunes once sang different tunes
A video showing Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., during the Clinton impeachment proceedings resurfaced this week, illustrating how the Judiciary Committee chairman has reversed his stance on impeachment now that that an inquiry has been activated into President Donald Trump.
Graham, an ardent ally of President Trump, sponsored a resolution that has been co-signed by all but three Senate Republicans decrying the House impeachment probe. He told Fox News host Sean Hannity in October that any articles of impeachment against Trump should be “dismissed in the Senate without a trial.” He also called the impeachment inquiry proceedings a “lynching in every sense.”
The video from 1998, when Graham was one of the Republican House members pushing to impeach President Bill Clinton, shows that Graham was once staunchly against members of Congress dismissing impeachment before seeing all of the facts.
View the complete November 22 article by Igor Derysh from Salon on the AlterNet website here.
Nunes Dumbfounded When Witness Debunks His Conspiracy Theory
House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes was caught off guard on Thursday when a witness in the impeachment hearings rejected a favorite right-wing conspiracy out of hand. It was an amusing and revealing moment showing how deep Nunes is in the alternative reality crafted by President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, outlets like Fox News, and others.
The moment came when he asked State Department official David Holmes about the so-called “black ledger,” which documented payments former Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort received from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. When the ledger was revealed in 2016, it prompted Manafort’s removal from the campaign, and Republicans have alleged that it was part of a plot by the country to hurt Trump. During his questioning, Nunes asked if Holmes had heard of the “black ledger.” Holmes said he had.
Holmes, who works at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, replied simply: “Yes.”
Nunes was clearly taken aback.
Local newspaper in Devin Nunes’ district wonders: Is our congressman coordinating with Trump during impeachment?
Throughout the public hearings for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, Rep. Devin Nunes of California has set out to discredit the testimony of witnesses subpoenaed by House Democrats. And Nunes’ relentless defense of Trump during the hearings is leading two reporters for McClatchy Newspapers — whose portfolio includes the Fresno Bee in Nunes’ part of Central California — to wonder if Nunes is coordinating with Trump on an impeachment defense.
In an article published by the Fresno Bee on November 19, Kate Irby and Francesca Chambers note the similarities between Trump’s impeachment-related talking points and Nunes’ assertions during Tuesday’s testimony. Nunes, the reporters point out, asserted, “Americans have learned to recognize fake news when they see it, and if the mainstream press won’t give it to them straight, they’ll go elsewhere to find it — which is exactly what the American people are doing.”
Nunes, Irby and Chambers observe, also sounded very Trumpian when, on Tuesday, he expressed his desire to know the identity of the Ukraine whistleblower — inspiring House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to call him out and assert that he wouldn’t tolerate the whistleblower’s identity being revealed.
View the complete November 20 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
Nunes blasted for nonsensical opening statement at impeachment hearing: ‘Seems unlikely’ GOP knew Sondland would affirm Trump’s ‘quid pro quo’
Rep. Devin Nunes of California has been one of President Donald Trump’s loudest, most strident defenders during the public impeachment hearings — and with Ambassador Gordon Sondland preparing to testify Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes was as bombastic as usual. During his opening statement, Nunes ranted about Democrats linking Trump to Russian interference in the 2016 election, insisted that Trump’s July 25 conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was perfectly innocent, declared that Sondland was “here today to be smeared” by Democrats, and even said that today’s Democrats would have impeached President George Washington if given the chance.
But Nunes’ critics have been pushing back on the congressman’s opening statements, noting that he plays hard and loose with the facts — and appeared unprepared for Sondland’s remarks.
On Wednesday morning, CNBC’s Christina Wilkie tweeted, “Nunes’ opening statement suggests Intel Republicans didn’t know (Ambassador) Sondland was flipping until the last minute, and Nunes didn’t have time to update his opening statement — to which Alex Thomas responded, “Yeah, the reaction I’m getting from everybody on the Hill right now is ‘Nunes read the wrong opening statement.’”
View the November 20 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.
Mitch McConnell Piously Urges ‘Civility’ In Politics
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for “civility” on Monday after his reelection campaign publicly mused about the death of one of his rivals.
McConnell told Kentucky residents in a speech that America has a “behavioral problem” adding, “People are acting out and it’s not, I don’t think, limited to one ideological place or another. You’ve just got a lot of people engaging in bad behavior.”
Americans have to “learn how to behave better, how to be able to disagree without anger,” he said.
View the complete November 19 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.
Devin Nunes pushes absurd conspiracy theories about Obama and ‘nude pictures of Trump’ at impeachment hearing
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, used his time at Wednesday’s impeachment hearing to push conspiracy theories about President Donald Trump and Ukraine.
Nunes began with an opening statement which included a misleading claim that Democrats on the committee had tried to “obtain nude pictures of Trump from Russian pranksters who pretended to be Ukrainian officials,” when in fact Intel Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said he would refer the materials to the FBI.
Nunes went on to allege that the Ukraine whistleblower who reported Trump’s call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “acknowledged to have a bias against President Trump” and falsely claimed that the whistleblower’s “attorney touted a ‘coup’ against the president,” when the attorney was actually referring to former acting Attorney General Sally Yates being fired for standing up to Trump in 2017.
View the complete November 14 article by Igor Derysh from Salon on the AlterNet website here.