Devin Nunes Is No Farmer-- But He Sure Knows How To Fling Bullshit

Towards the end of August there was a stir in the Central Valley when a judge ruled that two GOP congressmen, Jeff Denham and Devin Nunes could call themselves "farmer" on the ballot. Local farmers had complained that "neither was an actual farmer, The plaintiffs said the congressmen added those designations to their ballot descriptions in an effort to score political points in their agriculture-heavy Central Valley districts."

Denham “does not live on a farm or earn any income from work as a farmer,” said the suit challenging his designation. “Instead, he is a member of Congress who also owns a plastic business that sells products to those in the agriculture industry.”

The suit challenging Nunes’ description argued that the House Intelligence Committee chairman and fervent supporter of President Trump shouldn’t be allowed to call himself a “U.S. Representative/Farmer” because he no longer has a connection to his family’s longtime dairy business.

Nunes and Denham say they and their families have spent years as members of the farming community and still earn at least part of their living from agriculture.

But, as Ryan Lizza pointed out over the weekend in Esquire, there's a lot more to the Nunes-farmer connection than meets the eye. "Nunes," wrote Lizza, "has a secret... Nunes grew up in a family of dairy farmers in Tulare, California, and as long as he has been in politics, his family dairy has been central to his identity and a feature of every major political profile written about him... As recently as July 27, the lead of a Wall Street Journal editorial-page piece about Nunes, which featured a Tulare dateline, emphasized the dairy: “It’s 105 degrees as I stand with Rep. Devin Nunes on his family’s dairy farm.” That was a blatant, outright lie by the Wall Street Journal with no basis in fact. Nunes' family farm was sold in 2006 and the family bought a new one in Iowa. But the Tulare farm bulklshit is the story Nunes' p.r. person pushes out to the media. The right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page was happy to lie to their readers about it. Lizza exposed Nunes' lie-- and the hypocrisy-- in his piece.

So here’s the secret: The Nunes family dairy of political lore-- the one where his brother and parents work-- isn’t in California. It’s in Iowa. Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they-- as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori-- have lived since 2007. Devin’s uncle Gerald still owns a dairy back in Tulare, which is presumably where the Wall Street Journal’s reporter talked to Devin, and Devin is an investor in a Napa Valley winery, Alpha Omega, but his immediate family’s farm-- as well as his family-- is long gone.

There’s nothing particularly strange about a congressman’s family moving. But what is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public-- for more than a decade. As far as I could tell, until late August, neither Nunes nor the local California press that covers him had ever publicly mentioned that his family dairy is no longer in Tulare.

For example, in 2010 Nunes traveled to northwest Iowa to campaign for Steve King, the most anti-immigrant member of Congress, who now represents Nunes’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law in Sibley. It was an unusual place to find Devin Nunes, given that at the time he wasn’t known to be hostile to immigrants in the way that has made King, who has called illegal immigration a “slow-motion terrorist attack,” so infamous.

King’s office posted a press release online announcing that the town-hall event would be in Le Mars, a town fifty miles southwest of Sibley, and included some biographical information about Nunes, including this fact: “Congressman Nunes’ family has operated a dairy farm in Tulare County, California for three generations.” There was no mention that the Nunes family actually lived up the road in Sibley, where they operated a dairy. Strange.

The Nunes family farm runs on the labor of undocumented workers from Mexico and Guatemala. Still, the family contributes to the local GOP and Steve King, whose immigration agenda would put them out of business. More strange.

Just asking about it, got Lizza kicked out of the town coffee shop. Hostility was very high towards outsiders prying into the hypocrisy of it.

The absurdity of this situation-- funding and voting for politicians whose core promise is to implement immigration policies that would destroy their livelihoods-- has led some of the Republican-­supporting dairymen to rethink their political priorities. “Everyone’s got this feeling that in agriculture, we, the employers, are going to be criminalized,” the first area dairy farmer I had spoken to said. “I’ve talked to Steve King face-to-face, and that guy doesn’t care one iota about us. He does not care. He believes that if you have one undocumented worker on your place, you should probably go to prison and we need to get as many undocumented people out of here as possible.” (A spokesman for King did not respond to multiple interview requests.) The second dairy farmer, speaking of Trump’s and King’s views on undocumented immigrants, added, “They want to send ’em all back to Mexico and have them start over. What a crock of malarkey. Who’s gonna milk the cows?”

There is massive political hypocrisy at the center of this: Trump’s and King’s rural-farm supporters embrace anti-immigrant politicians while employing undocumented immigrants. The greatest threat to Iowa dairy farmers, of course, is not the press. It’s Donald Trump.

But that’s not how the Nunes family apparently saw it... The undocumented workers live in the shadows and, especially in the era of Trump and zero tolerance, constantly fear arrest and deportation. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress, including Devin Nunes (per his CaRepublican website), have decided that unwavering support for ICE is crucial to their efforts to attack Democrats and help the GOP keep control of the House of Representatives after the midterm elections. Naturally, the prospect of passing legislation that would create a guest-worker program for dairy workers who are undocumented-- an idea overwhelmingly supported by the industry-- is a fantasy in the current environment; Trump, King, and their allies describe such policies as “amnesty.” The Washington debate is completely detached from what is actually going on in places like Sibley.

The relationship between the Iowa dairy farmers and their undocumented employees is indeed fraught. I cringed at the way some of the dairy farmers talked about their “help.” When I asked one dairy farmer, who admitted many of the farm’s workers are undocumented but who also inexplicably claimed to be “very supportive of Trump” and “kind of in favor of his immigration laws,” what a solution would be, this farmer suggested a guest-worker program but compared the workers to farm animals. “It’s kind of like when you bought cattle out of South Dakota, or anyplace, you always had to have the brand inspected and you had to have the brand sheet when you hauled them across the state line,” the farmer said. “Well, what’s the difference? Why don’t they have to report to the city hall or county office and say we’re here working and everybody knows where they’re at?”