Republican House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes insisted he's not a tool of the Kremlin and dismissed the Democratic memo which was released as he was speaking at CPAC this Saturday.

Nunes: Dem memo doesn't change anything, proves intel abuse occurred:

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said on Saturday that a Democratic rebuttal to a GOP memo released earlier this month alleging abuses by the FBI and Justice Department will not affect the substance of the document.

"What you’re not going to see is anything that actually rejects what was actually in our memo," Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The first memo, released by Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, accused FBI and Justice Department officials of abusing their authority to obtain a surveillance warrant against a former Trump campaign adviser.

But Democrats on the panel raised concerns about the GOP document, which they said omitted key facts that would help put the memo's contents into the proper context. [...]

Nunes said that Republicans on the Intelligence Committee wanted the Democratic memo to be released because it would provide evidence that Democrats were working with the FBI and Justice Department to undermine President Trump and his campaign.

"What you basically will read in the Democratic memo is they are advocating that it is okay for the FBI and [Justice Department] to use political dirt paid for by one campaign and use it against the other campaign," he said.

More via Raw Story:

Nunes, who was a member of Trump’s transition team, said at the Conservative Political Action Conference that former President Barack Obama had “emboldened” Russia and Vladimir Putin.

“We hit a reset button,” the congressman said, “with Hillary Clinton. Then we said we were going to pivot to Asia because we were going to be friends with the Russians.” [...]

Nunes also denied being an agent of the Kremlin himself.

“I was asked to serve on the transition team. It was at that point I began getting accused by all sorts of media and some platforms that I was some sort of secret Russian agent,” he remarked. “If anybody was going to be accused of being a Russian agent, I would have been down towards the bottom of the list, after you listed all the Democrats in Congress.”

Of course, the opposite is true, and as Zack Beauchamp at Vox explained yesterday, the Democratic memo to the Nunes memo tears it apart.