Devin Nunes

Rep. Devin Nunes Tells California Republicans To Push Five Ballot Initiatives, Though Each Could Face Tall Hurdles

... type of sales tax," he said. "You would just basically get rid of the income tax and just basically have a consumption type system.". He said such a move would not be regressive. "It’s a very transparent way to do it, 150 countries around the world do it that way, there’s no reason why the state of California couldn’t do it," Nunes said. A state commission studied a similar tax plan in 2009 , but the proposal was summarily rejected by state lawmakers. Nunes told the delegates and their guests that if the ballot measures fail, Republicans should keep trying until they succeed. He later told reporters that he estimated it would cost the state GOP $10 million to $12 million each election cycle that the initiatives appear on the ballot. "I would argue that’s the best $10 or $12 million we could spend by putting the initiatives on the ballot” and therefore putting a Republican agenda on the ballot each election, he said. "I think it would show people in California what we actually stand for. I think right now it's very difficult to get our message across because we’re ...

Devin Nunes Oversimplifies Timeline Of Russia Reset

... with Putin," Nunes said. This description of the Obama administration’s position struck us as one-sided, so we took a closer look. We asked Nunes's office for comment, but didn't hear back. We concluded it’s misleading for Nunes to have ignored at least three years of the Obama administration in which the reset policy was dead, replaced by a much tougher line on Moscow. How the reset came about. In March 2009, about two months after Obama was sworn in, his administration initiated a new policy toward Russia called the "reset." The official kickoff came in Geneva on March 6, 2009, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov a red button. The new policy came less than a year after conflict flared in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions of Georgia, an independent country that was previously part of the Soviet Union. Obama’s foreign policy team had decided that the United States had a window of opportunity to find common ground on certain issues with Russia, given that Dmitry Medvedev had replaced Vladimir Putin as president in mid 2008. The administration - and some outside observers - credit the reset with some ...

Pressure Builds On Trump To Back Off Wiretap Accusations

... spied on Trump. Republican Representative Devin Nunes, who leads the House intelligence panel, said after receiving the material, he saw no evidence of wiretapping. But Nunes, who served on Trump's transition team, joined the White House in seeking to shift attention away from the controversies by calling for investigations of leaks to the news media. Nunes said on "Fox News Sunday" that leaks to reporters about former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn were criminal and that his panel was probing whether other names were leaked. Trump has been dogged by allegations that his associates had ties to Russian officials. He fired Flynn last month after reports he had discussed sanctions with Russia's ambassador before Trump took office, without telling other White House officials. "The one crime we know that's been committed is that one: the leaking of someone's name," Nunes said. "Were there any other names that were. leaked out?". Nunes also said ahead of Monday's hearing he had seen "no evidence" of collusion between Russia and Trump's team. But Schiff, the panel's top Democrat, said there was enough "circumstantial evidence" that he still had ...

Devin Nunes Is Playing A Familiar Game Today

... that some of Donald Trump's transition team might have been "incidentally" recorded during surveillance of foreign nationals. He won't say who. Nor will he say who the foreign nationals were, other than "not Russian." And as soon as he was done with his press conference, he trotted off to the White House to brief President Trump. There are several problems here. First, Nunes didn't share any of this with Democrats on the committee. Second, incidental collection is both routine and inevitable in foreign surveillance. Congress has had ample opportunity to rein it in if they wanted to, and they never have. Third, if this was part of a criminal investigation, Nunes may have jeopardized it by going public. Fourth, the chair of the Intelligence Committee isn't supposed to be briefing the president on the status of an investigation into the president's activities. This is plenty to embarrass the great state of California, from which Nunes hails. But for what it's worth, I don't think any of this is the biggest issue. This one is. He claims to have gotten the information personally from an unspecified source, and had not yet met with FBI Director James Comey to ...

Spying Claim By Intel Chair Renews Fight Over Russia Probe

... said, "What I've read bothers me, and I think it should bother the president himself and his team.". Trump said he felt "somewhat" vindicated by the Republican's revelations. "I very much appreciated the fact that they found what they found," he said. The disclosure came two days after FBI Director James Comey publicly confirmed the bureau's own investigation into the Trump campaign's connections with Russia and rejected Trump's explosive claims that President Barack Obama wiretapped his New York skyscraper during the election. Comey's comments came during the intelligence committee's first public hearing on Russia's election interference, an investigation being overseen by Nunes. Nunes briefed reporters on the new information without consulting with Schiff, and that did not sit well with the top Democrat on the committee. Schiff declared he now has "profound doubt" about the integrity and independence of the committee's probe. He said that "a credible ...

The Evidence Of Trump Tower Being Wiretapped Just Doesn’t Seem To Exist

... As I wrote at the time that Trump leveled these very serious allegations: The burden of proof was on him. To suggest that a former president orchestrated a listening program using the tools and resources of the federal government during a heated national campaign is a big charge. To do so without providing evidence — then or now — is eye-popping. The repercussions of such charges should be serious. After all, this is conspiracy theorizing at the top levels of government. But they almost certainly won't be, as a Republican Congress is unlikely to scold a Republican president so new to the White House. And Trump, if past is prologue, will somehow declare victory and move on. Top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee set a Monday deadline for President Trump's Justice Department to produce evidence to back up his claim that former president Barack Obama wire tapped him during the ...

This May Be The Worst Defense Of Trump’s Obama-wiretapped-me Claim

... worried that the current president accused the former president of a crime. Echoing so many Republican defenses of Trump's tweets, he suggested Tuesday that Trump's allegation simply shouldn't be taken at face value. Here's what Nunes said. The president is a neophyte to politics. He’s been doing this a little over a year. And I think a lot of the things that he says, you guys sometimes take literally. Sometimes he doesn’t have 27 lawyers and staff looking at what he does — which is, I think, at times refreshing and at times can also lead us to have to be sitting at a press conference like this, answering questions that you guys are asking. But at the end of the day, I think tweets are a very transparent way for a politician of any rank to communicate with their constituents. So I don't think we should attack the president for tweeting. There are a couple straw men here. One is the idea that Trump needs "27 lawyers” reading his tweets before they go out. The implication is that Trump didn't ...

He Was Too Busy To Tell Flynn To Talk Sanctions

... man in charge of investigating alleged contacts between the Trump administration and Russia — to talk to a reporter about the matter. So Nunes was already under fire for making it look as though he isn't entirely neutral in all of this. But there was one particular answer Nunes gave Monday that strained credulity and made it appear as if he were bending over backward to see the best in the White House. It had to do with former national security adviser  Michael T. Flynn's contact with Russia's ambassador to the United States in late December, about which Flynn misled the White House and was asked to resign. The big issue with Flynn's phone calls was that he discussed sanctions with Russia's ambassador on the same day the Obama administration was beginning new sanctions. That conversation was possibly in violation of the law (Flynn hasn't been charged). The prevailing theory is that perhaps the Trump White House, which has professed a desire for friendly relations with Russia, telegraphed that it would simply undo President Barack ...

Worthy Foes Who Lead House Russia Probe

... after entangling himself with a Soviet spy—a case that reads like a plotline of the hit spy series on FX, “The Americans.” (Schiff hasn't seen the show, but says his wife has been wanting to watch it with him. "Some of those shows feel too much like the day job," he told Real Clear Politics. "I feel like I get a lot of that from 9 to 5."). The California Democrat came to Congress in 2001 and has emerged as one of his party's experts on national security and foreign policy issues. His perch on the Intelligence Committee gives him a coveted platform to make his party’s case against Trump, but the sensitive nature of his position presents the challenge of not coming across as overtly political. "This is the most high profile issue we've had to handle, and one that has intense political consequences," Schiff told RCP ...