Rep. Devin Nunes, a once-obscure Republican congressman from California’s rural Central Valley, saw his fundraising spike during the first quarter of the year as his steady antagonism of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation turned him into a national folk hero on the Right.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is set to file a quarterly disclosure with the Federal Election Commission showing receipts of approximately $1.25 million from Jan. 1-March 31, roughly equivalent to what he raised during all of 2017. Nunes will report that he has banked around $4.5 million to spend on the midterm campaign, enough to make enthusiastic Democrats think twice before investing in his likely Democratic challenger.
These quarterly figures for a House member, even a committee chairman, are both strong and unusual — on par with what some competitive Republican Senate candidates are reporting this cycle. The achievement stems from the reputation Nunes has earned as an aggressive defender of President Trump in the federal probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Moscow to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“It is impressive,” a veteran Republican operative said, explaining that even in targeted House races, a great fundraising quarter for a single candidate tends to top out in the $500,000 to $750,000 range.
Sources close to Nunes shared his first-quarter numbers with the Washington Examiner on Tuesday in advance of the congressman’s FEC report. They credited Nunes’ stellar performance in part to the success of his first ever foray into national fundraising. Upon last month’s conclusion of House Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian meddling in 2016, the congressman launched a direct-mail and digital fundraising campaign as part of his effort to build a national donor network.
The sources expect Nunes’ second quarter fundraising to clock in at an even higher clip.
Nunes, 44, was first elected in 2002 and had developed a power base of influence on Capitol Hill, with close ties to House GOP leadership. Nunes bonded with Trump during the presidential campaign and a visit out to his congressional district, and served as an adviser to his presidential transition.
Their views on Vladimir Putin did not necessarily line up — Nunes has always been a Russia hawk. But from the outset, Nunes was suspicious of charges, mostly from Democrats, that Trump colluded with Moscow. Even as Nunes was leading the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling, his defense of the president and counterattacks on the Democrats escalated.
He has since supervised a House Intelligence panel probe of possible malfeasance by Trump’s opponents in the 2016 campaign as well as alleged impropriety on the part of the FBI and other federal officials that were involved in investigating Trump during that period, continuing through the transition and after he was inaugurated.
In the process, Nunes had become a conservative media star, with periodic appearances on programs like Sean Hannity’s highly rated Fox News show.
The congressman’s name recognition and popularity stock with the conservative grassroots has skyrocketed accordingly. And, he is now fielding dozens of invitations to speak to Republican groups and travel to the districts of his House GOP colleagues to headline campaign events, and plans to be active in fulfilling several of those requests.
Nunes also is putting his political celebrity to work for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP campaign arm. He signed two NRCC email fundraising appeals in March and was expected to do more because they performed well.
The missives target partisans who tend to be more enthusiastic than rank-and-file voters and donate money in small amounts — with the proper motivation. The NRCC wouldn’t ask the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to sign two emails in less than a month if he didn’t have pull with this crowd.
“As you can probably tell, I’m not the Mainstream Media’s favorite right now. Despite what they say about me, I refuse to yield to the radical left or their friends in the media,” the latest email, dropped this week, read. “The problem is, this makes me and other conservatives like me a target in the midterms. That’s why I’m asking everyone in our movement to step up and help me fend off the lies and attacks.”
