Darkness at Nunes
Watching the Devin Nunes memo blow up like a trick cigar a few weeks ago, Andrew Janz called himself “probably the happiest man in the country.”
An assistant district attorney vying to oust Nunes from his California congressional seat, Janz said last week that his campaign war chest had more than tripled since Nunes announced he was releasing highly edited Top Secret information to discredit the FBI and Justice Department investigations into “Russiagate.” That’s not saying much: The Democrat’s $240,000 purse would hardly cover the cost of robocalls in today’s congressional elections, where winning candidates spend an average of $1.3 million—and Nunes already has three times that figure. And while there were some signs the incumbent’s grip was slipping—a January poll commissioned by Janz showed Nunes leading a reelection bid by only five percent against a generic Democratic opponent—his highly edited release of the documents was proving popular among Republicans.
Still, Janz told me, “I’m feeling great, man. You've seen the memo. I think there's going to be plenty for folks on the Democratic side, and even some folks on the Senate Republican side, to poke holes in.”
Which is what they did. “The Nunes Memo fizzled and failed,” said former Nixon White House counsel-turned Watergate witness John Dean in a representative view. “The only thing it established is that Nunes is a nut job, and he has released anew the putrid stench of neo-McCarthyism.”
“Nut job” has
