How Many Watergates Is Devin Nunes’s Memo
0How Many Watergates Is Devin Nunes’s Memo.
Few media events better exemplify America’s political polarization than Devin Nunes’s much-hyped memo on alleged F.B.I. misconduct, which has been described by Democrats as a glorified Facebook post and by Trumpublicans as evidence of a world-historical conspiracy against the president. The arguments against the latter interpretation are almost too numerous to recount: Carter Page, the Trump campaign adviser placed under surveillance by the bureau in 2016, had already been a high-profile intelligence target for years. The FISA warrant for Page, which allegedly cited the Steele dossier, explicitly disclosed its political origins, a fact that Nunes initially declined to mention. The same F.B.I. that supposedly conspired with Hillary Clinton to overturn the results of the election also torpedoed Clinton’s campaign by publicly reopening her e-mail server case while declining to make public that it was also investigating the Trump campaign for collusion with Russia. If this was a coup attempt, it was the most boneheaded, incompetent, and confused conspiracy in history.
When Nunes finally released his four-page memo on Friday, the mania surrounding the document disappeared everywhere except the fever swamps of the far right, where the only debate was over the exact size and scope of the horror. “This political scandal is almost identical to Watergate in multiple respects, and it’s 10 times bigger,” Trump “voter fraud” czar Kris Kobach told Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM. Iowa Rep. Steve King initially described it, somewhat metaphysically, as “deeper than Watergate”; after its release, he called it “a component of what looks like a much larger conspiracy involving the #Obama DOJ & FBI & more.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity, who had predicted that the memo would make “Watergate [look like] stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore,” later said it was “Watergate times a thousand,” and demanded that the Robert Mueller probe be disbanded immediately. “The F.B.I. misled and purposefully deceived a federal court while using an unverified, completely phony opposition research bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton to spy on an opposition campaign during a presidential election!” said Hannity. “Now that type of abusive power, that type of corruption, that shredding of the Constitution—it is unprecedented in American history.” (Fox News host Chris Wallace, for his part, sagely suggested that it was neither “worse than Watergate” nor “nothing, as some have said.”)
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