AM Joy's panel discussion on the incompetent and seemingly corrupt Republican co-chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, was revealing and disturbing, This unusual spy-thriller/Trump saga is anything but predictable and conventional.
David Corn of Mother Jones asked Nunes if he had ever heard of Carter Page and/or Roger Stone, and his answer stunned the loquacious Corn into silence.
JOY REID: How is this possible?
CORN: You know, every once in a while you end up as a reporter, you ask a question, you get an answer and you're flabbergasted. I was stunned. There was no logical explanation. Either he's a dim wit who hasn't read a single story about the matter he's supposed to be vetting or he has some brain disease and he can't remember, or he was lying to me.
Nunes was on the transition team with Trump and he's obviously more concerned with representing the Executive Branch over the Legislative Committee, of which he is the co-chair.
CORN: It's the breakdown of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight process and, the one reason we let the Executive Branch do secret work in terms of espionage, counterintelligence, counterterrorism is, because they've overseen by the Legislative Branch and Devin Nunes just showed us this week that there's a complete breakdown in this process.
Malcolm Nance has a suspicion of where Nunes went with his newly minted information: right to the White House.
Someone was going through our classified internet....several different variations of classified internet. Typed in Donald Trump';s name, typed in Paul Manafort's name...that's all legal. But then him coming the next morning and saying, Ahah, this is the type of surveillance Donald Trump was under, it shows the man who is responsible for the complete oversight of the U.S.intelligence process is clueless about what surveillance is, is clueless about what incidental collection is. When you get incidental collection it means someone is a target and we heard your voice.
Nunes furtively went straight to Trump with this information, which really wasn't anything new.
He felt he had a duty and an obligation to the President of the United States over his own responsibilities to this country.
Joy asks Sarah Kendzior, an expert on authoritarian regimes, about Nunes' conduct, especially his claim that he felt sorry for the harshly critiqued Trump who's been taking 'a lot of heat from the media.'
KENDZIOR: This is just pathetic. He was supposed to be a watchdog and he's acting like a lap dog. He's supposed to be doing oversight and he's acting like an informant.
She states unequivocally that Nunes has no business being in such an important investigatory position. That leads Joy to the next matter, which is the ownership of a winery by Nunes and a Russian oligarch. Scott Dworkin expressed concern that it is far too simplistic to tie a member of Congress directly to a financial associate of Vladimir Putin, and this should raise some serious red flags.
Joy asks the $64,000 question, which is essentially, how did Nunes, a dairy farmer, get the job as the co-chair of the House Intelligence Committee?
I think we know why Nunes got the job: the rules are different for Republicans. Adam Schiff, his Democratic counterpart, is a former U.S. Attorney/Prosecutor who worked out of the Los Angeles field office. The fact that he is co-chairing a committee with a stooge like Nunes, who was handpicked by the clown dictator, has to be very frustrating for Rep. Schiff. It certainly is for many of us patriotic Americans.
