When discussing his threatened lawsuit against CNN and The Daily Beast on the Hannity show last night, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) stated unequivocally that he was acting out of vengeance, not a desire for truth, over reports that he met with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on Bidens and Democrats.
Once again, here is the backstory, via Vox:
At issue are reports the Daily Beast and CNN published last week about statements made by two lawyers representing Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s who was recently indicted for campaign finance violations and played a key role in Giuliani’s shadowy Ukrainian diplomacy.
In a report published Thursday, lawyer Ed MacMahon told the Daily Beast that Parnas “helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe” for Nunes during a congressional trip there last year. The next day, CNN advanced the story by reporting that according to another lawyer representing Parnas, Joseph Bondy, his client is willing to tell Congress that he helped arrange a meeting in Vienna between Nunes and disgraced former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin. (Shokin was pushed out as the country’s top prosecutor in May 2016 after then-Vice President Biden and other world leaders urged the Ukrainian government to do so, citing Shokin’s failure to curb corruption in the country. Shokin has since claimed, without evidence, that Biden’s real motivation was curbing an investigation into a company at which his son Hunter served as a board member.)
“Parnas says he worked to put Nunes in touch with Ukrainians who could help Nunes dig up dirt on Biden and Democrats in Ukraine, according to Bondy,” CNN reported — a revelation that, if true, indicates Nunes isn’t in a position to be an impartial broker as the top House Republican involved in impeachment hearings about Trump and Giuliani trying to leverage the Ukrainian government into announcing investigations aimed at discrediting Joe Biden.
As I have previously posted, Nunes has been declaring the reports “demonstrably false” without demonstrating any particular falsehoods. Even though, as CNN’s John King noted, if Nunes did not go to Vienna, he could easily provide travel documents to prove it and thus force House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to issue a statement declaring the reports false.
During his self-serving but unenlightening chat with Sean Hannity last night, Nunes decried the reporting as “fake news” without a word about the reality. The day before, Nunes bizarrely argued to Fox host Maria Bartiromo that he wanted “to answer all these questions” but couldn’t under the circumstances:
NUNES: I really want to answer all of these questions and I promise you I absolutely will come back on the show and answer these questions but because there is criminal activity here, we’re working with the appropriate law enforcement agencies, we’re going to fill all this, everyone’s gonna know the truth, everybody’s going to know all the facts, but I think you can understand that I can’t compete by trying to, trying to debate this out with the public media when 90% of the media are totally corrupt.
Yet, in explaining his pending lawsuit to Hannity, Nunes said nothing about establishing truth or facts about his interactions with Ukrainians or lack thereof:
NUNES: This has just gone on for too long, and this is the only way we’re going to be able to get retribution and get -- and be able to seek fairness and transparency in the media, is by holding them accountable.
Sure, fairness and transparency are important. But one would hope that a U.S. Congressman would be more interested in improving American media outlets than in punishing them.
Watch Nunes explain why he wants to sue below, from the November 26, 2019 Hannity.
Forget politics, left or right. Anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills should see through this pair’s gaslight shtick. Only the willfully ignorant (or the ignorant in general) will buy Hannity’s and Nune’s ’I’ve got secrets to exonerate Nunes but I refuse to share’ bulls—t. It’s like Uncle Joe McCarthy waving a blank sheet of paper while screaming he has a list of known Communists.