Nunes Memo to Nunes Agreement

Reading between the lines of the Devin documents.

Devin Nunes is an enigma.

He grew up on the family dairy farm. He went to junior college and then a California state school, majoring in agricultural business, and got his master’s in agriculture. He served on the board of the College of the Sequoias—the two-year institution where he got his associate’s degree—and was appointed by George W. Bush to a government job in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Between college and the USDA gig, he was a farmer.

Nunes was just 29 years old when he was elected to Congress. He ran in a district created by reapportionment after the 2000 census and won by virtue of living in Tulare County; the district is redder than red, and his two Republican opponents were both from Fresno. He cruised to reelection in 2004, 2006, and 2008. Another census-based district change did not affect his popularity. He won again in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020, never receiving less than 53 percent of the vote.

By 2011, Nunes had made it to the House Select Committee on Intelligence (HSCI). Four years later—which is to say, a year before Trump came along—he became HSCI chairman, and, after the Democrats won the House, ranking member. This means that Devin Nunes was privy to more intelligence than almost anyone else in the country. Even the classified stuff, the top secret material, he knew about.

As late as September 2016, when the HSCI released its declassified report on the traitor Edward Snowden, Nunes had the right take:

Edward Snowden is no hero—he’s a traitor who willfully betrayed his colleagues and his country. He put our servicemembers and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors. In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word.

And this:

I’m gratified that, with the completion of the declassification review, the American people can now get a fuller account of Edward Snowden’s crimes and the reckless disregard he has shown for U.S. national security, including the safety of American servicemen and women. It will take a long time to mitigate the damage he caused, and I look forward to the day when he returns to the United States to face justice.

How could it be that Nunes recognized Snowden as a Kremlin tool, but not Donald Trump?

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Christopher Steele, the former head of the Moscow desk for MI6, was tasked in 2016 with determining if Trump had connections to the Kremlin. The so-called “dossier”—actually a series of intelligence reports that included everything of note he’d heard, verified or not—was a product of this work.

Steele worked for Orbis Business Intelligence, his own outfit. Orbis was contracted with Fusion GPS, and no one at Orbis knew who was paying Fusion GPS for the information. First it was Republicans doing so; later it was Democrats footing the bill. This did not change the material nature of what Steele was doing, or what he found.

And what Steele found was so concerning that he felt obligated to report it to the FBI. Per the Congressional testimony of Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, Steele told him,

“I’m a former intelligence officer, and we’re your closest ally. You know, I have obligations, professional obligations. If there’s a national security emergency or possible national security issue, I should report it.” … And I said: “So you’re telling me that you think this is serious enough that it needs to be reported to law enforcement, and that you’re confident enough in your sources, its your professional judgment and your professional obligation, that you should report this to the FBI?” And he [Steele] said, ‘Yes.’”

For whatever reason, Steele’s attempt to warn the United States about Trump being a potential Putin puppet irked Devin Nunes to no end. Nunes didn’t like that the word of a highly-respected former MI6 officer—who had worked with the FBI to bring down bad guys before—was being used in the application for a FISA warrant for the Bureau to monitor the communications of an American businessman named Carter Page. (Contrary to popular belief, it is illegal for law enforcement to do this kind of thing without a judge signing off on it, and it’s not easy to get a judge to do so.) Page was briefly affiliated with the Trump campaign and appeared to have deep ties to Moscow.

Put another way, Nunes seemed to strongly believe that the privacy of one dodgy individual trumped (pun intended) a major national security threat. He was, and continues to be, very consistent in this position. A quick survey of his statements from March 2017 until the release of the “Nunes memo” in February 2018—and thanks to Lawfare for making a wonderful timeline of all of this—bear this out:

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Nunes speaking about the FBI looking into Mike Flynn
February 27, 2017

As of right now, I don’t have any evidence of any phone calls … That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I don’t have that. And what I’ve been told by many folks is that there’s nothing there.…I want to be very careful that we can’t just go on a witch hunt against Americans because they appear in news stories.

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Nunes on the alleged “Trump Tower tapp [sic]”
March 13, 2017

The Department of Justice has asked for more time to comply with the House Intelligence Committee’s request for information related to possible surveillance of Donald Trump or his associates during the election campaign....We have asked the department to provide us this information before the committee's open hearing scheduled for March 20. If the committee does not receive a response by then, the committee will ask for this information during the March 20 hearing and may resort to a compulsory process if our questions continue to go unanswered.

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Nunes at HSCI hearing, to Comey and Rogers
March 21, 2017

Were the communications of officials or associates of any campaign subject to any kind of improper surveillance? The Intelligence Community has extremely strict procedures for handling information pertaining to any U.S. citizens who are subject even to incidental surveillance, and this Committee wants to ensure all surveillance activities have followed all relevant laws, rules, and regulations. Let me be clear: we know there was not a wiretap on Trump Tower. However, it’s still possible that other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates.

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On March 21, 2017, per reporting by the Daily Beast and the New York Times, Nunes got an urgent text, jumped out of the Uber he was riding in with a staffer, and went directly to the White House, where he met with Trump loyalists Ezra Cohen-Watnick and Michael Ellis.

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Nunes at press conference the next day
March 22, 2017

At our open hearing on Monday, I encouraged anyone who has information about relative topics, including surveillance on President-elect Trump or his transition team, to come forward and speak to members of the Committee. I also said that while there was no a physical wiretap of Trump Tower, I was concerned that other surveillance activities were used against President Trump and his associates. So first, I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked. And forth and finally, I want to be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team….I’ve asked the directors of FBI, NSA, and CIA to expeditiously comply with my March 15th letter that you all received a couple of weeks ago, and provide a full account of these surveillance activities. I informed Speaker Ryan this morning of this information, and I will be going to the White House this afternoon to share what I know with the president and his team.

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Nunes’s spokesman statement on White House meeting
March 27, 2017

Chairman Nunes met with his source at the White House grounds in order to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source….The Chairman is extremely concerned by the possible improper unmasking of names of U.S. citizens, and he began looking into this issue even before President Trump tweeted his assertion that Trump Tower had been wiretapped.

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Nunes letter to Dan Coats
July 27, 2017

Obama-era officials sought the identities of Trump transition officials within intelligence reports…[T]here was no meaningful explanation offered by these officials as to why they needed or how they would use this U.S. person information, and thus, the Committee is left with the impression that these officials may have used this information for improper purposes, including the possibility of leaking.

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Nunes talking about his plan to release the “Nunes memo”
January 31, 2018

Having stonewalled Congress’ demands for information for nearly a year, it’s no surprise to see the FBI and DOJ issue spurious objections to allowing the American people to see information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies. The FBI is intimately familiar with “material omissions” with respect to their presentations to both Congress and the courts, and they are welcome to make public, to the greatest extent possible, all the information they have on these abuses. Regardless, it’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign. Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.

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Declassified by Trump on February 2, 2018, and subsequently released to the press, the “Nunes Memo” is a dud. It is not the smoking gun Republicans claim it would be. It alleges that James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, Andy McCabe, and others weren’t forthright in the FISA application to monitor Carter Page. Did you make it through that sentence without falling asleep? I’ve read the application. It seems perfectly legit to me. But Nunes found it appalling, an affront to civil liberties.

His obsession with “unmasking,” and his vexation about the Steele dossier he tried so hard to discredit, led to Nunes’s full-throated defense of Trump at the first impeachment hearing. On November 13, 2019, Nunes said:

In a July open hearing of this committee following publication of the Mueller report, the Democrats engaged in a last-ditch effort to convince the American people that President Trump is a Russian agent. That hearing was the pitiful finale of a three-year-long operation by the Democrats, the corrupt media, and partisan bureaucrats to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election.

After the spectacular implosion of their Russia hoax on July 24, in which they spent years denouncing any Republican who ever shook hands with a Russian, on July 25 they turned on a dime and now claim the real malfeasance is Republicans’ dealings with Ukraine.

and, even more preposterously:

For years they accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia when they themselves were colluding with Russia by funding and spreading the Steele dossier, which relied on Russian sources.

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By then, of course, Nunes had already (allegedly) been coordinating with Lev Parnas, who was tasked by Trump via Rudy Giuliani to find dirt in Ukraine on Joe and Hunter Biden. This is from Parnas’s letter to Congress on July 18, 2023:

Arriving back in the States, I began a series of regular meetings at the Trump International Hotel with Giuliani and what I later called the “BLT Team,” because we always met at the BLT steak restaurant in the hotel. The BLT team included Toensing, diGenoa and John Solomon, an investigative reporter who was then working for The Hill and had many contacts at Fox News and the State Department, as well as having Trump on his speed dial. Solomon gave us information at the meetings that he said various sources had shared with him about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine. Giuliani tasked me with traveling to Ukraine throughout March, April, and May 2019 to interview different people who had promised to give us information and evidence, including records of bribes bank records and incriminating tapes.

Yet every time I went on these trips and conducted these interviews, I came up with nothing. Lutsenko kept assuring me that they would announce an investigation into the Bidens, but that never happened either.

Around the same time as the BLT Team began meeting, I was introduced by phone to Congressman Devin Nunes, who was leading his own separate investigation into the Bidens. His team decided to work with the BLT Team, and I was told to keep in contact with Nunes’s staff member Derek Harvey. While I was on Ukraine on these assignments, Nunes and Harvey asked me to help set up interviews that would facilitate their investigation. With my assistance, Harvey conducted numerous interviews with Ukrainian prosecutors and officials via Skype.

During this process, the prosecutors initially expressed an interest in meeting Nunes directly and having him conduct in person interviews in Ukraine. But Nunes declined, explaining to me again by phone that because Republicans did not have control of the House, they would have to report any travel they were doing. Therefore, he believed, it was better to have Derek Harvey conduct the interviews on Skype so that Democrats wouldn’t know what was going on.

Parnas repeated these claims last month.

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On December 7, 2021, Devin Nunes announced that he was quitting. He was giving up his seat on the House Select Intelligence Committee—one of the most important positions in the country—to run Donald Trump’s new media company. He left on January 1, 2022—with a full year left in his term.

That brings us to this week, when Truth Social merged with Digital World Acquisition Group—which was already trading on the NASDAQ—and Devin Nunes was back in the news:

SARASOTA, Fla., March 26, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Trump Media & Technology Group (“TMTG”), operator of the social media platform Truth Social, announced today that after successfully completing its business combination with blank check company Digital World Acquisition Corp. (NASDAQ: DWAC), trading of TMTG’s common shares will begin on the NASDAQ stock exchange today. At market open, the ticker symbol will switch from “DWAC” to “DJT” for the company’s common shares….

We believe that the commencement of trading of DJT on the public markets testifies to Americans' demands for free-speech platforms that reject the stifling censorship imposed by Big Tech.

“We built this company to protect the American people’s voices and their freedom,” commented TMTG CEO Devin Nunes. “Having transformed into a public company, Truth Social remains committed to maintaining and vehemently defending a digital space for free expression.”

Per the SEC Form 8-K for the Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. filed yesterday—on April Fool’s Day, which seems appropriate:

Devin G. Nunes, Public TMTG’s Chief Executive Officer and a Director since 2022, previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2011 to 2022. He was the Republican leader and former Chairman of the HPSCI, a senior Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, and the Republican leader of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. Mr. Nunes was a vital contributor to the 2017 tax system overhaul, authoring a key provision to allow same-year expensing of all business investments for entrepreneurs and businesses. He also championed telemedicine to improve healthcare in underserved, rural areas. In his role on HPSCI, Mr. Nunes spent extensive time overseas working with U.S. military personnel, Central Intelligence Agency officials, and world leaders while promoting freedom and democratic values around the globe. During his time in Congress, many regarded Mr. Nunes as the House of Representatives’ preeminent investigator of government malfeasance and corruption; he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 2021. Mr. Nunes graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he received a bachelor’s degree in agricultural business and a master’s degree in agriculture. He is the author of “Restoring the Republic” and “Countdown to Socialism,” and was an early and prominent critic of big tech censorship.

With regard to the board, “the Class III directors are Eric Swider, Devin Nunes and Robert Lighthizer, and their terms expire at the annual meeting of stockholders to be held in 2026.”

There’s also the matter of compensation. Even if TMG is a “meme stock” destined to crash, Nunes is making a lot more money than he banked in Congress and with his winery:

On May 10, 2022, TMTG entered into the executive employment agreement with Devin Nunes to be effective as of January 2, 2022, pursuant to which Mr. Nunes serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Public TMTG (the “Nunes Agreement”). The Nunes Agreement provides for an annual base salary of $750,000 (subject to increase to $1,000,000 effective as of the second anniversary of the effective date), with an eligibility to participate in the annual bonus plan, if any, and an initial incentive equity grant of 145,000 Restricted Stock Units (“RSUs”). Any annual bonus and RSUs will remain subject to vesting and other terms as the board determines in its discretion. The Nunes Agreement also provides for severance in the event of a termination by the Company without cause or by Mr. Nunes for good reason of accrued obligations plus an amount equal to six (6) months of base salary.

This paragraph suggests that Nunes gave up his shares in exchange for $600,000 in guaranteed cash (boldface mine):

Following TMTG’s issuance of the TMTG Executive Promissory Note to Mr. Nunes prior to the Closing, TMTG amended the Nunes Agreement to provide that (i) following and contingent upon the Closing, Mr. Nunes will receive a retention bonus in the amount of $600,000, payable in a lump sum within 30 days after the Closing Date, (ii) Mr. Nunes will not receive the 145,000 RSUs described in the Nunes Agreement but will be eligible to receive discretionary equity awards pursuant to the Equity Incentive Plan, and (iii) TMTG acknowledges the TMTG Executive Promissory Note.

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What does all this mean?

MAGA is a cult. Michael Cohen has spoken of the effect Trump can have on certain people, men especially, who become awed by him. Lev Parnas said something similar. Could the dairy farmer from Tulare County have fallen under this magic MAGA spell? Could it be that Nunes sincerely believed that he was right—that Trump got railroaded, that the Democrats were working against him for political and not national security reasons, that the Russia stuff was bunk—and became so frustrated trying to defend FPOTUS, and so disgusted with Washington and the D.C. press and people making fun of him on Twitter, that he bailed to join Trump’s new venture and make more money?

Among all House Representatives, Nunes ranked 269th in net worth in 2018. I don’t think his fortunes changed much while he was in Congress. It’s not unreasonable for him to cash out—for the erstwhile dairy farmer to, ahem, milk the situation.

And maybe Nunes is not done with politics. Last week, longtime Trump crony Roger Stone suggested that Trump tap Nunes as his running mate. Stranger things have happened—and the enigmatic Devin Nunes knows all about strange things.

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Photo credit: President Donald J. Trump congratulates Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., Monday, Jan. 4, 2021, after presenting the Medal of Freedom to Nunes in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)