Some 300 hooting, jeering protesters hit the streets to angrily confront House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on a visit back to his district in California’s central valley.
“Get out of bed with Trump” and “We need a guard dog, not a lap dog” read signs and chanted protesters Friday. Some played the Russian national anthem.
It was Nunes’ first trip back to his district since his committee’s investigation into Russian interference into the presidential election — and any links to Donald Trump’s aides — has stalled amid acrimony over Nunes’ handling of the probe and his secretive moves to protect the president.
Nunes spoke on water policy Friday in Fresno at an annual meeting of agricultural lenders. He was quickly ushered in and out of the building through a rear entryway, successfully dodging most of the protesters, noted the Fresno Bee. “Come out and play, Nunes, you coward,” shouted one man with a megaphone, reported The Associated Press.
Rarely has the seven-term congressman met with such opposition until this year.
Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, is “not working for the people. He’s working for the president and that’s not his job,” one protester told KFSN-TV. He’s supposed to be “here for us. I feel his complicity in what’s going down.” Others in the crowd called for an independent investigation into the Russia issue.
He was also blasted by the crowd for his work attempting to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, for the Trump administration’s moves to slash the Environmental Protection Agency, and for Nunes’ refusal to hold town hall meetings in his district.
But the current hot-button topic was Nunes’ investigation of the Russian issue, and several signs demanded that Nunes recuse himself from the probe or resign.
In an odd, midnight trip earlier this month to the White House grounds Nunes viewed some secret intelligence — that he then presented to the White House, which is part of his committee’s investigation. The New York Times reported that Nunes was given access to the intelligence — which hasn’t been detailed — by White House staffers.
Nunes insisted the information — which he didn’t share with his own committee — may have revealed that some incidental surveillance occurred of Donald Trump during the presidential campaign while federal intelligence agencies were investigating others. He brought it up in an apparent support of Trump’s tweet that he was wiretapped during his campaign by Barack Obama’s orders, though there is no indication from Nunes’ information that Trump was a target or that his calls were wiretapped. FBI Director James Comey has testified that no such wiretapping occurred.
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), says he has now seen the same information that Nunes viewed, and called for it to be shared with the intelligence committee of both the House and Senate. “The White House has yet to explain why senior White House staff apparently shared these materials with but one member of either committee — only for their contents to be briefed back to the White House,” Schiff said in a statement.
There is currently no investigation by Nunes’ committee into Russian interference into the election, and the baton has been taken up instead by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which began holding hearings on Thursday.
Nunes insisted in Fresno that his committee’s investigation isn’t dead yet. “We haven’t stopped, that’s what I’m saying,” Nunes told KFSN. “We have had investigators working every single day on this issue.”
He told the local CBS station that “there’s nobody better than me right now” to be heading an investigation into the Russia issue.
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, Hundreds of Angry Protesters Slam Nunes In California,