It’s very telling that Fox News dredged up Trump-loyalist Rep. Devin Nunes instead of a real expert to weigh in on Donald Trump’s latest legal troubles, especially with regard to campaign finance violations.
Although currently chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes (R-CA) has no credentials in law, diplomacy, national security or intelligence. His degrees are in agriculture and agriculatural business. According to The New York Times, he did not learn on the job, either.
But Nunes appeared on Fox’s Your World show last week to discuss the sentencing of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen who has implicated his former client in campaign violations.
Predictably, Trumper Nunes announced, “It’s impossible to know what the actual truth is” with regard to Trump’s hush money payments to women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with him. “People do this all the time,” Nunes said. “They do settlements out of court. It happens, so I don’t know what the big deal is.”
The big deal is that there is evidence Trump made these particular settlements to hide information from the electorate. None other than Kellyanne Conway’s husband, who is a lawyer says so.
“You have people trying to turn this into some type of case for campaign finance violations,” Nunes continued, “which you know, even if it was, that’s typically handled civil level and it’s a fine.”
FACT CHECK: Nunes is wrong again because this is not the civil/fine kind of case.
Host Neil Cavuto pushed back. “It’s a little bit more than that, right?” He noted that the concern was that the payments were “really meant to be kept from the American people so as not to influence the election.” But Cavuto moderated his challenge by emphasizing that “the president’s critics” are saying, “You had something to do with this, Mr. Trump, you did indeed try to influence the election.”
“I think that you’d be hard pressed to try to sell that,” Nunes opined, despite the evidence indicating otherwise. “Let’s say that it was. I have no idea if it is, the courts would have to work that out, but it’s civil in nature. These campaign finance violations don’t end up as felonies.”
Maybe Nunes should read what Conway, former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal and former Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission Trevor Potter have to say in their jointly written editorial on the subject. Let’s just say they don’t think it’s any kind of civil nothingburger.
Nunes went on to offer his amateur opinion on Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, which Cavuto pretty much eviscerated.
Watch Nunes below, from the December 14, 2018 Your World, and thank the 2018 Blue Wave he will no longer be the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee come January.
They had a spit-take laugher story up yesterday about former car thief Darrell Issa proclaiming that Michael Flynn’s criminal prosecution would somehow be tossed, because Issa thinks it wasn’t handled correctly. Issa was also doing the same bizarre jumping up and down that Fox News and AM Radio has been doing about how the FBI was engaged in somehow unfair tactics. These are the same pundits who celebrated every investigation they could throw at President Clinton, President Obama and Hillary Clinton. But now they feel that everyone should take a breath, since Mike Pence is the acting president?
There’s been one other moment of hilarity running through Fox News and AM Radio, BTW. Somehow the Right Wing is trying, as a gesture of heartfelt concern of course, to warn Dems that impeachment is a bad idea. The Right Wing is taking the momentary position that they were mistaken to impeach Bill Clinton in the 90s as this only increased his approval rating. Once you stop laughing hysterically at their obvious attempt here, the nonsense becomes overwhelming. Clinton’s popularity increased because it was generally known by everyone that he hadn’t committed any more serious crime than lying to a gotcha question about his infidelities. Was this a stupid and frankly immoral thing for him to do? Sure. Was it something that merited practically shutting down the government to have a show trial? Nope. It was obvious partisanship and vindictiveness. But in the case of the Trump campaign and the Pence White House, we’re seeing very real criminality and conspiracy on multiple fronts. Payoffs, intimidation attempts, collusion with foreign interests, open corruption, etc. Not the same thing as the Clinton impeachment at all.
And sure, the Right Wing is just so remorseful about impeaching President Clinton. They were salivating about doing it then, and they’re delighted they did it. Having run that process means that every time they have to discuss the Clinton White House, they get to add that impeachment asterisk to it. They’re not sorry they did that. Just as they’re waiting for the final destruction of the ACA to run their postmortems on the Obama White House – since they’ll now be able to establish that they’ve pretty much erased every single thing that was accomplished between 2009 and 2016.