The Rachel Maddow Show was gifted with a secret recording of a recent private fundraiser hosted by Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intel Committee, who, instead of taking his job seriously, has been a knight-defender of the President, extending himself to releasing memos that purported to clear the President of wrong-doing, while not paying a whit’s attention to his bailiwick.
Or so, at least, it seems to me.
TRMS has released transcripts of selected portions of the recording, which I found interesting.
Clip #1:
REP. NUNES (R-CA): “So therein lies, so it’s like your classic Catch-22 situation where we were at a – this puts us in such a tough spot. If Sessions won’t unrecuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones. Which is really the danger. That’s why I keep, and thank you for saying it by the way, I mean we have to keep all these seats. We have to keep the majority. If we do not keep the majority, all of this goes away.”
Clip #2:
REP. NUNES (R-CA): “They know it’s ridiculous to go after the president for obstruction of justice. But if they tell a lie often enough and they put it out there and they say, ‘Oh, we’re looking at the tweets,’ cause you know you’ve got a mixed bag on the tweets, right? Like sometimes you love the president’s tweets, sometimes we cringe on the president’s tweets. But they’re trying to make a political, this is all political as to why that story ran in the New York Times on the tweets.”
So that confirms the impression. One might wonder if, as he asserts, this is really the Democrats engaging in a political lynching, and that might be reasonable if the situation were considered in isolation.
But once we consider the deceit and venality of Nunes, of Trump, of various Cabinet members, then it’s hard to consider Nunes’ contention to be reasonable.
So that’s our lesson for today. The Big Lie paradoxically works very well, and not well at all, in the Age of the Internet.
