The Third Stooge: Devin Nunes

Devin Nunes has been one of Trump's most consistent defenders, co-conspirators and enablers in Congress. As Mark Sumner pointed out yesterday at Daily Kos, Nunes has been pretending to be an investigator, when he was part of the criminal syndicate all along. At the very least, an Ethics Committee investigation is required and likely inevitable-- and probably a great deal more. Vicky Ward's CNN exclusive yesterday was a shocker-- and possibly a harbinger of the end of Nunes' career in politics. Lev of Igor and Lev has ratted him out-- and in a big way!

Ward wrote that Joseph Bondy an attorney for Giuliani crony Lev Parnas told CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings Nunes had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up-- or manufacturing-- dirt on Joe Biden and his son. Bondy said that Parnas was told directly by former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Victor Shokin that he met last year in Vienna with Rep. Devin Nunes. Shokin is the crook who Biden helped get fired for not persecuting corruption cases. Bondy told CNN that Lev and Nunes "began communicating around the time of the Vienna trip. Parnas says he worked to put Nunes in touch with Ukrainians who could help Nunes dig up dirt on Biden and Democrats in Ukraine." So... Nunes was the third stooge-- Igor, Lev and Devin!

Bondy tells CNN his client is willing to comply with a Congressional subpoena for documents and testimony as part of the impeachment inquiry in a manner that would allow him to protect his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Bondy suggested in a tweet on Friday that he was already speaking to House Intel though the committee declined to comment.

Giuliani has told CNN previously about his conversations with Shokin and  Parnas, saying that this was part of his legal work for his client, President Trump. Parnas' claims about Nunes' alleged involvement offers a new wrinkle and for the first time suggests the efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens involved a member of Congress.

Parnas' claims that Nunes met with Shokin, which has not been previously reported, add further context to a Daily Beast report that Parnas helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe for Nunes last year, citing another Parnas' lawyer, Ed MacMahon.

Those revelations came to a head on Thursday when Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell raised the Daily Beast story publicly during the impeachment hearing.

Parnas, who was indicted on federal campaign finance charges last month, worked with Shokin and Giuliani to push a pair of unfounded claims: that Ukrainians interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats, and that Biden was acting corruptly in Ukraine on behalf of his son Hunter, who sat on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.

According to Bondy, Parnas claims Nunes worked to push similar allegations of Democratic corruption.

"Nunes had told Shokin of the urgent need to launch investigations into Burisma, Joe and Hunter Biden, and any purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election," Bondy told CNN.

...Parnas is currently under house arrest in Florida and has pleaded not guilty to charges of federal campaign finance fraud.

Over the past two weeks, CNN approached Nunes on two occasions and reached out to his communications staff to get comment for this story.

In the Capitol on Nov. 14, as CNN began to ask a question about the trip to Vienna, Nunes interjected and said, "I don't talk to you in this lifetime or the next lifetime."

"At any time," Nunes added. "On any question."

Asked again on Thursday about his travel to Vienna and his interactions with Shokin and Parnas, Nunes gave a similar response.

"To be perfectly clear, I don't acknowledge any questions from you in this lifetime or the next lifetime," Nunes said while leaving the impeachment hearing. "I don't acknowledge any question from you ever."

Congressional travel records show that Nunes and three aides traveled to Europe from November 30 to December 3, 2018. The records do not specify that Nunes and his staff went to Vienna or Austria, and Nunes was not required to disclose the exact details of the trip.

Nunes' entourage included retired colonel Derek Harvey, who had previously worked for Trump on the National Security Council, and now works for Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee. Harvey declined to comment.

Bondy told CNN that Nunes planned the trip to Vienna after Republicans lost control of the House in the mid-term elections on Nov. 6, 2018.

"Mr. Parnas learned through Nunes' investigator, Derek Harvey, that the Congressman had sequenced this trip to occur after the mid-term elections yet before Congress' return to session, so that Nunes would not have to disclose the trip details to his Democrat colleagues in Congress," said Bondy.

At the time of the trip, Nunes was chairman of the Intelligence Committee. In January, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff  took over as chairman of the powerful committee, which is now conducting the impeachment inquiry.  

Bondy says that according to his client, following a brief in-person meeting in late 2018, Parnas and Nunes had at least two more phone conversations, and that Nunes instructed Parnas to work with Harvey on the Ukraine matters.

Parnas says that shortly after the Vienna trip, he and Harvey met at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where they discussed claims about the Bidens as well as allegations of Ukrainian election interference, according to Bondy.

Following this,  Bondy says that in a phone conversation Nunes told Parnas that he was conducting his own investigation into the Bidens  and asked Par nas for help validating information he'd gathered from conversations with various current and former Ukrainian officials, including Shokin.

Parnas says that Nunes told him he'd been partly working off of  information from the journalist John Solomon, who had written a number of articles on the Biden conspiracy theory for The Hill, according to Bondy. 

  ...Bondy tells CNN that Parnas is also willing to tell Congress about a series of regular meetings he says he took part in at the Trump International Hotel in Washington that concerned Ukraine. According to Bondy, Parnas became part of what he described as a "team" that met several times a week in a private room at the BLT restaurant on the second floor of the Trump Hotel. In addition to giving the group access to key people in Ukraine who could help their cause, Parnas translated their conversations, Bondy said.

The group, according to Bondy,  included Giuliani, Parnas, the journalist Solomon, and the married attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing.  Parnas said that Harvey would occasionally be present as well, and that it was Parnas' understanding that Harvey was Nunes' proxy, Bondy said. 

Solomon confirmed the meetings to CNN but said that calling the group a team was a bit of a mischaracterization. Solomon said that connectivity happened more organically, and that his role was only as a journalist reporting a story. 

Solomon also said that Di Genova and  Toensing, his lawyers, introduced him to Parnas as a facilitator and interpreter in early March. "Parnas was very helpful to me in getting Ukraine officials on the record," Solomon told CNN. "I only gradually realized Lev was working for other people, including Rudy Giuliani."

...In the weeks since his arrest, Parnas has become disenchanted with Trump  and Giuliani, according to Bondy as well as other sources who spoke to CNN. Parnas, these sources say, was particularly upset when Trump denied knowing him the day after Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were arrested in October.

Last week, CNN reported that Parnas had claimed to have had a private meeting with Trump in which the President tasked him with a "secret mission" to uncover dirt on Democrats in Ukraine.

"He believes he has put himself out there for the President and now he's been completely hung out to dry," a person close to Parnas told CNN. Last week, the White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment to a series of questions regarding the meeting and Trump's relationship with Parnas.

On Thursday, Bondy promoted the hashtag #LetLevSpeak on Twitter in response to a number of questions about whether Parnas would testify in front of Congress.

Bondy tweeted directly at Republican California Rep. Kevin McCarthy Thursday night after McCarthy accused Schiff of blocking important witnesses from testifying, saying "I don't agree with your premise, but please, if you mean what you say, call my client, Lev Parnas. #LetLevSpeak."

The progressive Democrat running for Nunes' Central Valley seat, Dary Rezvani told me that "All of this just continues to show how little Congressman Nunes actually cares about being a representative. The country is largely focused on just how corrupt these actions are and I have seen multiple comments asking how our district could ever vote for someone like him. Nunes has continued to be Trump biggest defender in Congress and this just shows how far he has been willing to go in his attempted protection and defense of Trump. All of that being said what is more concerning to me is that all of this protection has taken precedent over serving the constituents of CA-22. As our opioid crisis continued to worsen, as healthcare providers continued to leave our rural communities, and as our air and water quality continues to rank as some of the worst in the nation, Nunes has decided that further implicating himself with the corrupt actions of this administration was more important than addressing any of the issues impacting his district. He would know that if he had taken even a moment of time to hold a town hall in the last ten years. We are losing family farms to large corporations who don’t care about the district and continue to poison our communities with harmful pesticides yet he totes himself as a farmer who protects farmers. He is nothing more than a politician who protects his own interests and those of corporations seeking to make a quick buck off of an already impoverished  community that lacks the resources to fight back. I want to believe that at one point he became an elected official to do the right thing but the more I talk to farmers in our south valley, the less I believe this was ever the case. The reason Nunes has continued to be re-elected is because our district’s issues are systemic and just saying how bad Nunes is will never work simply because we have such low voter engagement. We will replace him when our Democratic nominee understands the root cause of our issues and has plans to fix them."

The Democratic Party has long ignored CA-22 in the Central Valley. As the party discovered last cycle, that's been big mistake. Had they been registering voters and building infrastructure over the last few years, Nunes would have bee defeated in 2018. Right now the district's population is 39.1% white, 47.5% Latino, 7.6% Asian and 2.9% black. That sounds like a winnable California district. But party registration isn't reflected in those demograhics. The Fresno County part of the district has 93,787 registered Republicans, 75,314 registered Democrats and 54,439 decline-to-state voters. The Tulare County part of the district has 50,371 registered Republicans, 39,635 registered Democrats and 32,590 decline-to-state voters. Please consider helping Rezvani replace Nunes in Congress by contributing to his campaign via the Blue California thermometer on the right.

Greg Sargent wrote today in his Washington Post column that "We need a deep reset. It's time to rhetorically treat Trump's defenders like his criminal accomplices." Yes-- and not just rhetorically... judicially as well.

UPDATE: Nunes Says He's Suing

The Central Valley crackpot says he's suing CNN and the Daily Beast. Nunes to right-wing media site Breitbart: "These demonstrably false and scandalous stories published by the Daily Beast and CNN are the perfect example of defamation and reckless disregard for the truth. Some political operative offered these fake stories to at least five different media outlets before finding someone irresponsible enough to publish them. I look forward to prosecuting these cases, including the media outlets, as well as the sources of their fake stories, to the fullest extent of the law. I intend to hold the Daily Beast and CNN accountable for their actions. They will find themselves in court soon after Thanksgiving." I wonder if they get to sit next to @DevinCow, who Nunes is also supposedly suing.