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How Devin Nunes Turned the House Intelligence Committee Inside Out

In inquiries on Benghazi and Russia and beyond, the California congressman has displayed a deep mistrust of the expert consensus on reality — a disposition that has helped him make friends in the current White House.

By JASON ZENGERLEAPRIL 24, 2018

In Late August 2016, Donald Trump paid a visit to Tulare, Calif., a small city in the agricultural Central Valley and an unlikely stop for a Republican presidential campaign. California is a solidly blue state, and although Trump was in Tulare to speak at a fund-raiser, the $2,700 that most guests ponied up to attend hardly seemed substantial enough to justify the presence of a busy candidate. (At a fund-raiser Trump attended in Silicon Valley the day before, guests paid $25,000 a head.) At least one senior Trump campaign official argued against the trip, deeming it a colossal waste of time.

But Trump had one very good reason for visiting Tulare: It is the hometown of Representative Devin Nunes. While many Republican elected officials had maintained a wary distance from their party’s presidential nominee, Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was one of the few, not to mention one of the most prominent, to offer Trump his unequivocal support — which included holding the fund-raiser. Better still, Trump liked Nunes. Although the 44-year-old congressman seems to wear a permanent grimace in public, as if trying to lend his boyish face some gravitas, in private he is a bit of a bon vivant. “He’s a pretty easy guy to like,” says Johnny Amaral, Nunes’s longtime political consigliere and friend. “And he’s fiercely loyal. I think Trump recognized that.”

The day before the Tulare event, Nunes drove up to the Bay Area to meet Trump and brief him on his district. Nunes expected to drive back to Tulare that evening, but Trump invited Nunes to fly with him to Los Angeles instead and then on to Tulare the next morning. It is unclear just what they discussed over those 24 hours, but by all accounts they seem to have strengthened their bond, and Nunes soon entered Trump’s inner circle — cementing a political alliance that would become one of the most consequential of the Trump era.

In the beginning, it was Nunes who influenced Trump. During the campaign, he tutored the candidate on water policy — a crucial issue to California agribusiness interests — and Trump heeded his warnings about the perfidy of environmentalists and government bureaucrats who were creating a “man-made drought.” At the Tulare fund-raiser, Trump promised the crowd that he would get their water back for them. Once Trump was elected, he appointed Nunes to the executive committee of his transition team, where Nunes helped shape the nascent Trump administration’s foreign policy. “He just took a very proactive role,” one Trump transition official recalls. “He was very aggressive and assertive about things and people we had to have.” According to the Trump transition official, Nunes was among the strongest advocates for Mike Pompeo, a colleague of his on the Intelligence Committee, to become the C.I.A. director and for James Mattis to become the secretary of defense. He also recommended a number of staff members, including his Intelligence Committee aide Derek Harvey, for positions on the National Security Council. “If we didn’t have Nunes,” the transition official says, “we wouldn’t have had anything stood up. He took the lead and was very important.”

The Trump team was so impressed with Nunes that, according to the transition official, it considered bringing him into the administration. A few weeks after the election, the congressman traveled to Trump Tower, where, according to transition officials, he and Trump discussed the possibility of his becoming the director of national intelligence and overseeing an ambitious reorganization of the intelligence community. But Trump ultimately decided to shelve those plans and appoint as director a less disruptive figure, Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator. Besides, with Pompeo leaving Capitol Hill for Langley, Trump’s circle believed that Nunes would be even more valuable to the administration if he remained in Congress, running the Intelligence Committee.

‘Devin and I had a very good relationship until March 21,’ Adam Schiff said. ‘From that point on, I think that he considered it his primary mission to protect the White House no matter the cost.’

Some 17 months later, that looks to have been a remarkably prescient decision — as Trump appears to have been able to influence Nunes to a remarkable degree. So much so that during Trump’s time in the White House, Nunes has transformed the Intelligence Committee into a beachhead from which to rally his fellow Republicans in support of the president against his perceived enemies — not just the Democratic Party but also the F.B.I., the Department of Justice and the entire intelligence community.

In March 2017, the committee started an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections in order to produce, as Nunes promised at the time, a “bipartisan” and “definitive” report. But since then, Nunes has used the committee only to sow confusion — confusion that has benefited Trump. Perhaps his most notable disclosure from the investigation occurred in February when, over the objections of committee Democrats as well as the Justice Department and the F.B.I., Nunes released a memorandum alleging a conspiracy against the president. He argued that federal investigators seeking a secret surveillance warrant for Carter Page, a former adviser of Trump’s, had failed to fully inform judges that the information in the application came from a potentially biased source, the infamous dossier compiled on behalf of Democrats by the former British spy Christopher Steele. “Political dirt was used by the F.B.I., and they knew it was political dirt, to open a counterintelligence investigation into the [Trump] campaign,” Nunes told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “It seems like the counterintelligence investigation should have been opened up against the Hillary campaign when they got ahold of the dossier.”

Then, in March, Nunes and the committee Republicans abruptly wrapped up the investigation into Russian meddling, having concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and that, contrary to the official consensus of the American intelligence community, the Russian government was not even seeking to help elect Trump. The president soon promoted the findings on Twitter: “THE HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE HAS, AFTER A 14 MONTH LONG IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION, FOUND NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION OR COORDINATION BETWEEN THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND RUSSIA TO INFLUENCE THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.”

In addition, Nunes has begun a parallel investigation of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for supposedly abusing their powers in an effort to hurt Trump. On April 10, Nunes instructed the Justice Department to give Congress the two-page document that started the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation in 2016 and threatened the impeachment of the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein if they didn’t comply. “We’re not messing around here,” Nunes told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. Wray and Rosenstein acquiesced. Then on April 13, Nunes, along with two other Republican committee chairmen, demanded that Rosenstein turn over copies of the memos James Comey had drafted, as F.B.I. director, about his conversations with Trump. Rosenstein had previously refused to do so, on the grounds that the memos were part of the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, into the 2016 elections, but on April 19, he complied. The move set a dangerous precedent for Congress to interfere with the bureau’s active investigations, especially Mueller’s — which it will almost certainly continue to do.

Indeed, Nunes has already begun laying the groundwork to discredit Mueller’s work before it is even completed. As he said of the special counsel’s investigation in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo last month, “I have no faith in that process.” (It’s rubbing off: A recent NPR/PBS “NewsHour”/Marist poll revealed that a majority of Republicans think the F.B.I. is biased against the president.)

The White House has certainly appreciated Nunes’s efforts. “Only Mark Meadows,” the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, “has a stronger relationship with Trump,” the former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon says of Nunes. “Nunes’s relationship with Trump is that strong.” And what makes Nunes an especially strong — and effective — ally for Trump is that they share a worldview. Both men have long considered themselves outsiders doing battle with a corrupt, rigged system. (Nunes refused multiple interview requests for this article. Provided a list of detailed questions, Jack Langer, a Nunes spokesman, responded: “The ‘facts’ sent by The New York Times Magazine to check for this article, filled with laughable fictional stories and some entertaining conspiracy theories, are great examples of why so few people trust The New York Times anymore.”)

While many Republicans on Capitol Hill may nurse private reservations about Trump but choose not to voice them or stand in his way out of political calculation and fear, Nunes is a true believer. Years before the Russia investigation, he was extremely skeptical of — if not paranoid about — the American military and intelligence establishments in a way that presaged Trump’s denunciations of the “deep state.” Now he and Trump are waging war against these foes, real and imagined, together.

Devin Nunes began his political career, appropriately enough, because he believed he had uncovered a sinister plot. In 1996, he was 22, a graduate of the College of the Sequoias and utterly convinced that his alma mater was secretly planning to close its campus farm.

Nunes was born into farming. His grandfather founded Nunes & Sons, a prominent dairy operation in Tulare County. As a child, Nunes milked cows and won a Future Farmers of America junior grand champion title with a Holstein named Gem. But Nunes had another abiding interest besides agriculture. In high school, he belonged not just to the F.F.A. but also to the Young Republicans, and he made something of a name for himself as a local political activist. So a few years later, when the College of the Sequoias announced that it was selling the roughly 160 acres on which its campus farm sat — the same farm where Nunes and thousands of other agriculture students had tended to sheep and goats and pigs while earning their associate’s degrees — he found a way to marry his two passions. Although he was still younger than many of the students at the two-year community college, Nunes decided to run for the school’s board of trustees, which is elected by local voters. His opponent was a four-term incumbent in his late 50s. Nunes’s platform was as simple as it was urgent: Save the farm. “Devin stood up and said: ‘You can’t do this. The farm is a treasure. It’s a gem to have this and to have the ability to teach hands-on information about what’s going on in agriculture,” recalls Amaral, who has known Nunes since high school.

There was just one problem: The farm didn’t need saving. “We were selling off the old farm, and we were putting the money in a fund to buy a bigger piece of land to build a new farm,” says John Zumwalt, who was then on the board. “Of course we weren’t going to get rid of it.” (Agriculture has long been one of the college’s largest departments.) But in a community like the Central Valley, Nunes’s theory about a plot to close the farm resonated with voters, and he unseated the incumbent. Despite the fevered nature of his campaign, Nunes proved to be an effective member of the board. He was instrumental in finding the nearly 500-acre parcel that the college ultimately bought to build its new, much bigger farm. “When Devin first came on, there was some resentment toward him because we liked the guy he beat,” Zumwalt says. “But that went away within the first year. He worked really hard to make sure we did it right, and by God, we did.”

Just two years later, Nunes decided to run for Congress, successfully battling the California elections board to let him appear on the ballot even though he would be only 24 on the day of the Republican primary, on the argument that he would be 25 by the general election in November — finally old enough to serve in the House of Representatives. He wound up losing the primary by 800 votes, only to watch his opponent be defeated by the Democratic incumbent. But in 2002, after the California Legislature created a new, more Republican-friendly Central Valley congressional district, Nunes ran again and won.

In the House, Nunes quickly fell under the tutelage of John Boehner, who seemed an unlikely choice of mentor at the time. Ever since a failed coup attempt against Newt Gingrich in 1997, Boehner had been wandering the political wilderness; he had little truck with House Republican leaders like Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay. But Boehner offered other certain intangibles that appealed to Nunes — namely a laid-back persona and a clubhouse-like office where cigarette smoking was permitted, red wine flowed and 5 o’clock could never seem to come soon enough. Nunes entertained Boehner and the group around him with stories about farming and soon developed a reputation as something of a jokester, thanks to his penchant for coming up with cutting nicknames for other House members. (I asked Pat Tiberi, a former congressman from Ohio who frequented Boehner’s office, what some of those nicknames were, but he demurred. “I probably shouldn’t go there,” he said. “Devin has a very good sense of humor.”)

By 2006, the congressional Republican leadership had been tarnished by a series of ethics scandals; suddenly, being on a team of outsiders was politically advantageous. Boehner challenged Roy Blunt, a Hastert and DeLay lieutenant, in a race for House majority leader, and Nunes proved himself to be a crucial vote wrangler in the effort. After Boehner returned to the upper echelons of the G.O.P., first as party leader and then in 2010 as speaker of the House, Nunes continued to serve as a valuable wingman, raising lots of money and regularly voting with leadership — “a loyal, trusted and honest member of the team,” one former Boehner aide says.

What’s more, he was a brawler. “Devin was a member who wouldn’t hesitate to speak out when he saw factions within the conference undermining the leadership or taking advantage of situations in ways that impacted the team,” the Boehner aide recalls. In 2013, when Boehner was unable to dissuade a group of conservative Republican members from shutting down the federal government, Nunes memorably called them “lemmings with suicide vests,” elaborating: “It’s kind of an insult to lemmings to call them lemmings. So they’d have to be more than just a lemming, because jumping to your death is not enough.”

“When Devin’s all in, he’s all in,” Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, told me. “And when he is on your side, he is on your side. If there was a bar fight going on and Dev walked into the bar and he saw one of his friends, he would immediately get in on the side of his friend. And when it was over and they were walking out, then he’d say, ‘What was that all about?’?”

Boehner rewarded Nunes’s loyalty in 2010, selecting him as one of just a dozen Republicans to serve on the 20-member House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Nunes seemed to delight in the cloak-and-dagger aura of the assignment. Once, after leaving an embassy dinner in Washington, a fellow congressman remembers Nunes gleefully informing him that the diplomatic attaché he found so alluring was, in fact, her country’s top intelligence officer in the United States. In the middle of a run-of-the-mill congressional delegation visit to a foreign capital, Nunes excused himself, explaining that he needed to go receive a briefing from the C.I.A. station chief there.

Nunes became a prodigious and daring traveler, designing such lengthy and punishing itineraries that he was often the only congressman on the trips. “He’d go to God-awful places like Djibouti and Jakarta and not come back for something like two weeks,” one former Intelligence Committee staff member recalls. Nunes’s approach to the job set him apart from his fellow committee members in other ways. When he was appointed to the panel, he was one of several new members, including the Tea Party firebrand Michele Bachmann, whom Boehner had chosen as an apparent olive branch to the House’s most conservative members. Some committee members and staff had been wary that Bachmann, with her fringe politics, would be an uncomfortable fit. But it was Nunes who turned out to be the problem. While Bachmann diligently requested briefings and studied classified materials — “She was running for president, so she wanted to learn,” one former committee staff member says — Nunes gained a reputation as an inattentive student.

In the Intelligence Committee’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — a secure office in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center where the committee does its work — there’s a log that keeps track of all the classified materials members request to read. The log’s primary purpose is security, but it also serves as a way of determining which members are doing their homework. According to three people familiar with the log, during Nunes’s first several years on the committee, he rated as its “least read” member. He had a similarly poor record of visiting the intelligence agencies for briefings. His lack of preparation could be seen in the committee’s classified hearings, where, according to a former committee staff member, Nunes often seemed out of his depth. “The committee gets to ask direct questions of the C.I.A. director for two hours a quarter, and if a member is using up half his time on questions that he should already know the answers to, it’s not very productive,” the former staff member says.

Even worse, in the eyes of some of committee members and staff, was how Nunes did get his information. “He’d go out to these hinterlands and run into security guys there, and they’d give him crazy ideas,” the former committee staff member says. “He wasn’t discerning. These guys might have something interesting that’s one piece of the whole puzzle, but he’d think whatever they had to say was the whole truth.” Then, when Nunes brought back that information to Washington and intelligence officials would try to put it in context for him — or correct any misinformation — he would become suspicious. “He didn’t take people at face value,” a former government official recalls, “and didn’t always believe leadership.”

Nunes could go to great lengths in pursuit of his suspicions. In late 2012, he said he heard from “informants” that Obama administration officials were ignoring evidence in a cache of documents collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showing that Al Qaeda was much stronger than the administration publicly contended. Nunes took these allegations to the Intelligence Committee’s chairman, Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, who in turn questioned intelligence officials. Rogers was satisfied with their answers and told Nunes that he believed that the documents, which were being analyzed by Defense Intelligence Agency officials at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., revealed nothing quite so significant. But Nunes wasn’t convinced.

On a Saturday in May 2013, he flew from Washington to Tampa and paid a visit to Centcom headquarters himself, where he demanded to meet with the analysts reviewing the documents, in the hope of uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda’s strength — and an Obama administration cover-up. But after a meeting with the Army major general who headed Centcom’s intelligence wing, Nunes came back to Washington empty-handed.

At the same time, Nunes was also trying to prove that the Obama administration had covered up key facts about the assault on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Not long after the September 2012 attack, which killed four Americans, including the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, the Intelligence Committee began investigating the episode to determine if there had been any intelligence failures. Before going into politics, Rogers, the committee’s chairman, had been an F.B.I. agent — he was confident he knew how to conduct an investigation. But Nunes apparently did not believe that Rogers was pushing hard enough, and he repeatedly gave Rogers what he thought were tantalizing leads, ones that might prove that the Obama administration could have prevented, or at least mitigated, the Benghazi attack and then tried to cover up its mistake.

Nunes had heard that a drone operator at an American air base in Germany said a drone had been flying over the Benghazi compound during the raid and captured video of the incident. According to a source familiar with the investigation, Rogers sent a committee staff member, Michael Ellis, to Germany to find and interview the American drone operator — who, it turned out, wasn’t even in the drone unit that covered Libya and had been telling tales to his parents, which had somehow made their way to Nunes. Rogers was frustrated that he had spent so long investigating a lead that he believed was absurd on its face. Nunes was not chastened; instead he grew discouraged that Rogers wasn’t pursuing even more leads.

The conflict between Rogers and Nunes eventually came to a head over the committee’s handling of five C.I.A. contractors who performed a rescue mission in Benghazi on the night of the raid. The contractors claimed that they were told to “stand down” that evening by the C.I.A. officer in charge at Benghazi. They found their way to Nunes in the fall of 2013, and they quickly hit it off with the congressman. “He was there to hear our story, and the only one I knew of looking for the truth,” Mark Geist, one of the C.I.A. contractors, told me. “That proved his credibility.” Nunes encouraged Rogers to invite the men to testify before the committee, which the panel did in November 2013.

The night before their testimony, Geist and two of the other contractors met with Nunes in his congressional office, according to their attorney, Mark Zaid. As they drank port and smoked cigarettes, they received a visit from a surprise guest. Nunes had invited Boehner to join them. For 45 minutes, the speaker was given a preview of what the men would testify about the next day in front of the Intelligence Committee. When Rogers got wind of what happened, he was alarmed. A longtime Boehner ally, he called his friend and, according to a person familiar with the conversation, told him he was potentially tainting the investigation.

In the end, Rogers and the committee staff did not put much stock in the men’s testimony, finding it muddled and inconsistent. The next November, when the Intelligence Committee released its Benghazi report, it concluded that there had been no “stand down” order. Nunes refused to endorse the report. And Boehner seemed to agree with him, having already created a special committee to investigate Benghazi — essentially kneecapping Rogers and the Intelligence Committee and paving the way for the further politicization of the panel.

Indeed, Rogers was so bruised by the Benghazi experience that it contributed to his decision to retire from Congress in 2014. Before leaving, he recommended that Representative Mike Conaway of Texas be made the next chairman of the Intelligence Committee, according to people familiar with the matter. But Boehner had someone else in mind to succeed Rogers. In November 2014, he appointed Nunes as chairman.

The chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee is one of the most plum assignments on Capitol Hill. Its holder is a member of the “Gang of Eight” — party leaders of both houses of Congress and the top Democrat and Republican on the Intelligence Committees — and is therefore privy to America’s most sensitive national security secrets. As chairman, Nunes now had the power to pursue any number of foreign policy issues — from defeating ISIS to containing Russia to checking Iran. The item that topped his agenda, however, was hardly a geostrategic imperative: He was, according to multiple sources, obsessed with the Azores, the semiautonomous Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Nunes’s fixation on the Azores would come to dominate his initial years as chairman and serve as an object lesson in his intense distrust of the intelligence apparatus that he oversees.

In part, Nunes cared about the Azores for personal reasons. His family traces its heritage to the Azores; his wife has roots there as well. Nunes once wrote that because so many Americans of Portuguese descent came from the islands, there was a “unique bond between America and the Azores.” But even those dewy sentiments don’t seem to explain just how fixated Nunes was on the island territory.

For decades, the most concrete bond between the United States and the Azores was an American military installation on Terceira Island called Lajes Field. During the Cold War, American P-3 planes used Lajes to chase Soviet submarines all over the Atlantic; it also served as a fueling station for cargo planes and fighter jets en route from the United States to military installations in Europe and the Middle East. But the end of the Cold War and technological advances brought an end to Lajes’s strategic importance. The United States no longer needed to worry as much about maritime supremacy in the Atlantic. Cargo planes and fighter jets had sufficient flying ranges that they no longer needed to make as many stops to refuel. Lajes was a natural target for cutbacks, and in 2012, the Air Force announced that it planned to scale back its presence there, ultimately reducing its head count to around 165 from 650.

Even before he was Intelligence Committee chairman, Nunes tried to fight the cuts. He proposed locating an Air Force drone base at Lajes that could be used to target Islamic militants in Northern Africa. He introduced a bill to move the military’s Africa Command from Stuttgart, Germany, back to the continental United States — with the provision that Lajes be made Africom’s forward operating base. He suggested making Lajes a training facility for F-16 pilots. None of the ideas were deemed practical.

More controversial, according to two former government officials, Nunes tried to use his junior perch on the Intelligence Committee to install a National Security Agency listening post at Lajes. It was not a natural fit for the agency, largely because Portugal is not part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, in which Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States share signals intelligence. And although Portugal and the United States are allies, the American intelligence community doesn’t fully trust its Portuguese counterpart. (There’s an old saying among spies: “There are no friendly intelligence services”; even allies gather information on one another for leverage should they need it.) Nor was the N.S.A. confident that Portugal had the type of counterintelligence controls to protect American secrets. According to these former government officials, Nunes pressed Rogers to insert a provision into legislation that would require the N.S.A. to put a listening post at Lajes. Rogers refused. When Nunes wouldn’t relent, Rogers arranged for Nunes to make his case directly to officials from the C.I.A., the N.S.A. and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. They also rejected the idea.

Once he became chairman, Nunes unveiled a new proposal for Lajes: making it the home of the Joint Intelligence Analysis Complex (JIAC), which included a huge new “intelligence fusion center” for the United States and its NATO allies. But the Pentagon was already planning to build the JIAC at the Croughton Royal Air Force base near London. Not only was Croughton deemed to be the ideal location for the complex, but Lajes was also singularly ill equipped for the job. The base’s housing and facilities would need to be expanded, and perhaps more crucial, the undersea communications cables connecting Terceira to Europe and the United States were not sufficiently robust, meaning new ones would have to be laid.

Although Nunes claimed that locating the JIAC at Lajes instead of Croughton would save the Pentagon $35 million a year because of the lower cost of living in the Azores and other efficiencies there, the Pentagon estimated that the infrastructure improvements needed at Lajes would cost $1.3 billion more than those at Croughton. (Nunes would later accuse the Defense Department of inflating its cost estimates and asked its inspector general to investigate; the inspector general’s report showed that the Pentagon’s budget projections were far more accurate than Nunes’s.)

And, cost aside, there was still the fact that Lajes is on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, making it inconvenient for many NATO allies. Nunes liked to call the Azores “the Hawaii of the Atlantic Ocean, only closer to America’s homeland.” But Hawaii, of course, has the advantage of being part of America. And as James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, told Nunes at one Intelligence Committee hearing: “In Hawaii, there are high schools, and there are medical facilities, and there are PXs and commissaries. And that’s kind of lacking right now in Lajes.” NATO’s military commander at the time, Gen. Philip Breedlove of the Air Force, told National Review that putting the JIAC at Lajes “would not make financial, strategic or operational sense.”

Nunes persisted. In May 2015, he led a congressional delegation to Lajes. The visit got off to a rough start when the delegation’s plane had to abort its landing attempt at Lajes because of high winds — a not-uncommon occurrence there — and divert to a landing field on another island 165 miles away. After finally making it to the base, Nunes and the delegation toured the facilities to assess their suitability for the JIAC. “It wasn’t a fact-gathering visit,” says a government official who was at Lajes during the delegation’s visit. “They had their opinions, and they were looking to find justification for them.”

That evening, the Azorean president, Vasco Cordeiro, hosted a dinner in honor of Nunes and his fellow congressmen. A number of senior Portuguese government officials, including the foreign minister, were also in attendance. According to an American official who was at the dinner, Nunes made a toast in which he committed to finding a solution that would not only please the United States but also get the Portuguese everything they wanted. As the evening went on, Nunes’s congressional colleagues made their own toasts echoing his sentiments. “It was like a fraternity event where everyone was pledging their loyalty to that mission,” the American official recalls.

Seemingly every time American military or intelligence officials would note an obstacle to Lajes’s hosting the JIAC, Nunes would dismiss it as either a red herring or, worse, a manufactured excuse. “He felt that the reason the Pentagon wasn’t willing to engage on this issue was that the generals didn’t want to give up their lifestyles of being close to London or in Germany,” the government official says. Jim Townsend, who as President Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy was the Pentagon’s point person on Lajes, says of Nunes, “He looked on this almost from a paranoid perspective, like we were out to get him.”

In the end, Nunes did not get his way: The JIAC is still planned for Croughton, and the American presence at Lajes has been drastically reduced. But Nunes created so much rancor over the issue that some American officials came to question his motives, and even his patriotism. “I was having a hard-enough time being beaten up by the Azoreans and the Portuguese, but it was even harder seeing a congressman being in cahoots with them,” Townsend says. “It was like, ‘Whose team are you on?’?” A former Pentagon official suspects that during the Lajes negotiations, Nunes was making the Portuguese privy to things they should not have known. “We would have a conversation about some proprietary matters with Nunes,” this official says, “and then the next day, somehow, Portugal knew some of that.”

Looking back on the episode now, Townsend views it as a harbinger of sorts. “When all this stuff happened with the Russians, I laughed like hell,” he says, in reference to the Intelligence Committee’s investigation descending into chaos. “Of course it’s Nunes!”

The moment Nunes was transformed from a powerful but little-known congressman into one of the most polarizing figures in American politics — praised by Donald Trump as a man who “may someday be recognized as a Great American Hero,” denounced by Nancy Pelosi as “a stooge for the president” — occurred on the evening of March 21, 2017. On that night, Nunes was reportedly riding with an aide in an Uber across Washington to an event when he received a call on his cellphone. After hanging up, Nunes abandoned the Uber and the aide and rushed toward the White House.

Until then, according to Republicans and Democrats, Nunes had handled himself well on the question of Russian influence on the 2016 elections. Together with the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff of California, he had labored to establish an independent investigation. They had drawn up an extensive witness list, pressed intelligence agencies to share highly classified information and, most important, decided to look into areas that might prove politically unpalatable to the Trump administration — namely the question of whether any Americans had colluded with the Russians. “For a Congress that was generally not known for legislative accomplishments and bipartisanship,” says Michael Bahar, a former Democratic staff director for the committee, “the Intelligence Committee under the leadership of Schiff and Nunes, for the first two years, was remarkably functional, productive and bipartisan.”

On March 20, all those qualities seemed evident when the committee held the first open hearing of its Russia investigation, with James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, as its star witness. “I hope that this committee’s bipartisan investigation,” Nunes said in his opening remarks, “will result in a definitive report on the Russian actions taken during the election campaign.” Schiff echoed those sentiments in his own opening statement. Then Comey made the hearing’s biggest news — revealing that the F.B.I. was conducting a counterintelligence investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Nunes knew Comey’s announcement was coming, but the hearing seemed to shake him and his fellow Republicans. “Republican members would tell me some time after that hearing that they considered that hearing to be an unmitigated disaster for them,” Schiff told me. Other Republicans claim it was Schiff himself who was the problem. “I know there were members who wanted Devin to be more out front, because his ranking member, the top Democrat on the committee, was out doing the camera stuff every day,” says Pat Tiberi, the former Republican congressman. “That kind of forced Devin, ironically, to do something he historically over the last 15 years hasn’t done.”

Whatever the motivation, a little over 24 hours after he gaveled the hearing to a close, Nunes arrived for his late-night visit to Pennsylvania Avenue. He headed to the National Security Council offices on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, right next to the White House. There he reportedly met with Michael Ellis, the man who had once been sent to find Nunes’s fabulist drone pilot in Germany and who was now working for Trump’s N.S.C. Ellis showed Nunes classified documents that had been gathered by another N.S.C. staff member, Ezra Cohen-Watnick.

The next afternoon, Nunes called a news conference in the Capitol, where he announced that “sources” had provided him with evidence that, during the transition, the president or his associates had been swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies. When a reporter asked him if he thought that the American intelligence community was “spying on Trump during the transition,” Nunes replied, “I guess it all depends on one’s definition of spying.” He added: “Clearly it bothers me enough. I’m not comfortable with it.” Nunes seemed to be lending credence to Trump’s preposterous accusation on Twitter from earlier that month that Obama had his “?‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.”

Nunes then headed back to the White House to brief Trump on his findings — a seemingly unnecessary move considering that the information had been given to him by Trump’s own aides. A few days later, after reporters exposed the ruse (including the fact that the Obama-era eavesdropping had been legal, incidental and inconsequential), Nunes recused himself from the committee’s Russia investigation, although he still refused to cede subpoena power to his replacement, Mike Conaway. In December, after the House Ethics Committee concluded that Nunes hadn’t illegally revealed classified information, he more firmly took the reins of the Russia investigation.

For House Democrats, Nunes’s “midnight run,” as they now call it, represented a fundamental break. “Devin and I had a very good relationship until March 21,” Schiff told me. “From that point on, I think that he considered it his primary mission to protect the White House no matter the cost.” In the process, Nunes has all but destroyed what was once the House Intelligence Committee’s greatest asset. When the committee was being created in 1977, to exercise legislative oversight of American intelligence agencies, Speaker Tip O’Neill pledged, “This is a nonpartisan committee; there will be nothing partisan about its deliberations.” Although that goal was occasionally tested, the spirit of nonpartisanship generally prevailed and at times even flourished, as it had under Nunes’s predecessor, Mike Rogers, and his Democratic counterpart, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland. “It’s not like Dutch and Mike weren’t stalwarts of their own parties, but they knew they had a national security mission,” says Jamil Jaffer, a Republican lawyer who was a senior counsel on the committee. “They got together and said, ‘Look, this stuff is too important to screw up.’?”

But since Nunes’s midnight run, the committee has been crippled by partisan fighting. When the committee met in late March to discuss releasing the Republicans’ incomplete report on Russia, not one Democrat on the committee voted to do so. Representative Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, openly mocked his Republican colleagues, clucking at them like a chicken. Now that the committee’s Russia investigation is essentially over — Schiff and his fellow Democrats have pledged to keep investigating on their own, but they won’t get far without subpoena power — the ill will isn’t likely to dissipate. “I don’t know that it can recover, given the degree of bad blood that’s developed between the members,” Representative Tom Cole says. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and member of the committee, told me: “It is irreparable as long as Devin Nunes is the chairman. He is Trump’s Michael Cohen in Congress. He is Trump’s fixer.” Beyond that, Nunes has damaged the relationship between the committee and the intelligence agencies themselves. “A lot of your effectiveness in overseeing the intelligence community is based on them wanting to have a good relationship with the overseers,” says a former Intelligence Committee staff member. “That’s all blown up. They’re not going to do anything they don’t absolutely have to do. They’re going to marginalize the community.” The former staff member adds: “It’s totally toxic. It’s irreversible. I think the committee has been essentially rendered useless.”

From the ashes of his own committee, though, Nunes has emerged in a far more powerful position. His congressional district is so sufficiently red that despite his Democratic challenger’s multiple appearances on MSNBC, his seat should be safe this November, even in what’s shaping up to be a strong Democratic year. In fact, his stature in the area has been enhanced by the Russia controversy. Jim Brulte, the chairman of the California G.O.P., told me: “If you’re a Republican officeholder in California, and Nancy Pelosi attacks you, I think most Republican voters turn around and go, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard of this guy, but if Pelosi is against him, I’m for him.’?”

More important, the Russia brouhaha has elevated Nunes far beyond the Central Valley. Once considered the scourge of the Tea Party, he is now viewed as a rock star by the activist Republican base across the country. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of the House G.O.P., uses him in its fund-raising emails. And among his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, he has never been more popular — so much so that more than one prominent Republican with whom I spoke predicted that Nunes is on track to one day become the top Republican on the all-powerful Ways and Means Committee.

In February, at its annual Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, the American Conservative Union presented Nunes with its Defender of Freedom Award for “concerted courage, standing up for truth and freedom under intense duress.” When Nunes accepted the award, he was greeted with cries of “We love you, Devin!” His familiar grimace gave way to a broad smile.

“I don’t know, Mr. Chairman,” Matt Schlapp, the A.C.U. leader, told Nunes as they appeared onstage together. “I think they like you.”


Jason Zengerle is a contributing writer for the magazine and the political correspondent for GQ. He last wrote about Rex Tillerson.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/magazine/how-devin-nunes-turned-the-house-intelligence-committee-inside-out.html?