In many ways, Thursday’s classified Justice Department briefing was the culmination of a year’s work for House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes. For months, Nunes has been demanding that the Justice Department turn over information documenting how and why they first began to investigate the Trump campaign for potential collusion with Russian efforts to undermine the U.S. presidential election in 2016. The California Republican has made no secret of his belief that partisan hacks at DOJ launched that investigation on disastrously scant evidence, and has heaped derision on law enforcement for resisting his challenge to prove him wrong.
So when President Trump unexpectedly announced this week that the White House was organizing a Justice Department briefing at which Nunes would be able to “open up documents, take a look, and find out what happened,” you’d think the chairman had struck gold. But the Thursday meeting came and went—and so far, no word from Nunes on whether his suspicions were confirmed.
In a sense, of course, this is not surprising: The whole bone of contention between House Intel Republicans and the FBI has been that the documents in question are highly classified, so it would be irresponsible of Nunes to spread that information publicly after receiving it. That said, there’s nothing to prevent Nunes from offering general takeaways from the meeting, such as, whether he found the information offered by the Justice Department to be reassuring, or whether he remained concerned. So far, he has not done so. (A spokesman for Nunes declined to comment for this article.) Why would this be?
It’s possible that Nunes’s silence indicates that the Justice Department briefing laid out a compelling case for why the FBI was justified in surveilling the Trump campaign—given that he’s spent a year muttering ominously about partisan pettifoggery at the DOJ, it’s hard to imagine Nunes sprinting to the nearest microphone to call off the dogs. Then again, it’s equally possible that even in the Thursday briefing, the Justice Department did not open their books to Nunes’ satisfaction: President Trump on Wednesday declined to say whether he had actually ordered DOJ to release all the documents the House Intelligence Committee had subpoenaed. “I want them all to get together and I want them—because everybody wants this solved,” Trump said then. “I want them all to get together. They’ll sit in a room. Hopefully they’ll be able to work it out among themselves.”
One other possibility: Nunes might have elected not to put much emphasis on this particular meeting given the way the White House rolled it out, mixing up the list of invited lawmakers over the day leading up to the briefing after Democrats howled about the impropriety of holding private briefings for a single party. (The Justice Department ultimately held two consecutive classified meetings: One for Nunes and fellow Intel Republican Trey Gowdy, and one for the so-called “Gang of Eight,” the bipartisan group of congressional leaders who are regularly briefed on classified intelligence matters.)
More awkward still, Democrats accused the White House of failing to keep a proper distance from the meeting: one of the president’s attorneys assisting him with the Russia investigation, Emmet Flood, was present for the first part of the meeting, even though the information to be discussed directly pertained to that investigation. And presidential lawyer/spokesman Rudy Giuliani said explicitly on Thursday that the White House would adjust their legal strategy based on what they learned from the briefing: “We want to see how the briefing went today and how much we learned from it,” Giuliani told Politico. “If we learned a good deal from it, it will shorten that whole process considerably.”
Given all that, maybe it’s not surprising Nunes preferred to let the more reliably bland House Speaker Paul Ryan do the talking: “I appreciate the Department arranging today’s briefing. As always, I cannot and will not comment on a classified session. I look forward to the prompt completion of the intelligence committee’s oversight work in this area now that they are getting the cooperation necessary for them to complete their work while protecting sources and methods.”
