OPINION:
Former Rep. Devin Nunes, President-elect Donald Trump’s designated intelligence adviser and slayer of the Democratic Party’s discredited dossier, has a new target, he told The Washington Times exclusively.
Mr. Nunes said he wants the “infected by politics” intelligence community to clean up its partisan “politicization.” And Mr. Trump is “determined to root it out.”
With the dossier, Mr. Nunes sat in a strategic spot with the power to investigate FBI partisanship. As House Intelligence Committee chairman, the California Republican exposed the bureau as the prime useful idiot of the anti-Trump Steele dossier. His 2018 Nunes memo, declassified by Mr. Trump, rewrote history on the biggest hoax in modern U.S. political history.
Today, Mr. Nunes is about to assume another influential post. Mr. Trump has named him to chair the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, where he will have direct access to the president on all matters of intelligence.
Mr. Trump will hear other voices. Both the director of national intelligence, slated to be former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and the nominee for CIA director, John Ratcliffe, are Trump supporters. Mr. Ratcliffe, too, is a former Republican congressman whom Mr. Trump made director of national intelligence near the end of his term.
But it is Mr. Nunes with whom Mr. Trump has forged a strong alliance. In 2021, he hired him as chairman and CEO of his new Trump Media & Technology Group, which includes the Trump-dominated blogging site Truth Social.
Mr. Nunes will lead two panels: the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, or PIAB, whose membership is limited to 16 government outsiders, and its investigative committee, the Intelligence Oversight Board.
The tenacious Mr. Nunes exposed the FBI-dossier marriage against intense fire in the House from now-Sen. Adam Schiff and his liberal media followers. Mr. Nunes signals he will be just as spirited as the presidential intelligence adviser.
“We’ll provide President Trump with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s operations, including highlighting any abuses or politicization of intelligence we may find,” Mr. Nunes told me. “We’ll be there to look over every program for the president and see where problems occur as well as where there are new opportunities.”
In that sense, Mr. Nunes will be part of the Trump vanguard, determined to improve the government’s performance.
“The Intelligence Community does a good job with certain things and needs to work harder on others,” Mr. Nunes said. “It’s hard in public to talk about their successes because many of them stay secret. Big failures, like the Afghanistan withdrawal, which seems to have been a failure on every conceivable level, are obvious, but successes — even major ones — are often kept under wraps.”
Mr. Nunes, 51, told me he has seen several intelligence moves rooted in politics. He specifically mentioned one of the most notorious, the “letter of 51.” The public letter was signed by retired intelligence big shots such as Obama loyalists John Brennan and Leon Panetta, both former CIA directors, and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence.
Two weeks before the 2020 Trump vs. Biden election, they assured the country the scandalous Hunter Biden laptop was Russian election interference. They were wrong. The only election interference came from the 51. House Republicans churned up evidence that the CIA bureaucracy fast-tracked the letter for release before Election Day.
“My biggest concern is the politicization of the intelligence community,” Mr. Nunes told me. “It’s indisputable at this point that the top strata of many intel agencies have been infected by politics. You see it all the time, with the constant leaking and flagrant political interventions like the 51 spies letter and the direct pressure on big tech to censor information on the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
“That’s really got to stop,” he said. “And President Trump, as one of the primary victims of politicized intelligence, is determined to root it out. The production of reliable intelligence is vital to our national security, and politicized intel is inherently unreliable and therefore damaging to our national interests.”
Mr. Nunes will have unique White House access. His board is not wrapped in the federal bureaucracy. The PIAB works within the Executive Office of the President.
There are 18 organizations in the U.S. intelligence community, including the chief spy Central Intelligence Agency, the electronic eavesdropping National Security Agency and the nation’s counterintelligence force, the FBI.
The FBI opened a full-blown investigation into Mr. Trump’s world on July 31, 2016, using hearsay evidence. It then embraced the dossier to try to prove that he and his aides conspired with Russia. They did not. Then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe specifically opened a case to target Mr. Trump in 2017 after he fired Director James Comey, a dossier promoter.
According to an investigation led by special counsel John Durham, the FBI never confirmed any substantive dossier allegation despite four years of trying.
As Mr. Nunes becomes Mr. Trump’s intelligence adviser, the former congressman’s chief dossier investigator in 2017, Kash Patel, is the president-elect’s pick to head the FBI. He has maintained ties to Mr. Nunes as a Trump Media board member.
The FBI pushed the dossier allegations, validated the Hunter Biden laptop in 2019, and did not tell the public.
Two forceful Washington figures, Mr. Nunes and Mr. Patel, promise to make spy agencies cleaner and better.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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