19 Apr 2017 8:21 pm
From the Ryan Lizza piece:Devin Nunes Reportedly Felt Pressure from White House to ‘Manufacture Fake Scandal’
As we posted about last week, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have reportedly found no evidence to support claims that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice acted improperly.
This revelation came following a review of the same materials examined by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.
Now, a new report suggests that Nunes may have been feeling pressure from the White House to justify President Donald Trump‘s March 4 tweet that he had his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower.
According to a report from The New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza, an unnamed intelligence source believes Nunes may have felt some heat from the White House to “manufacture a fake scandal.”
From the report:
Nunes recused himself from the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian manipulation in the 2016 election, and is currently the subject of a House Ethics Committee probe into whether he leaked classified information.
But according to Lizza, “this is like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.
The bigger scandal is the coordinated effort to use the American intelligence services to manufacture an excuse for Trump’s original tweet.”
THE CONTINUING FALLOUT FROM TRUMP AND NUNES’S FAKE SCANDAL
It is now clear that the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal.