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Devin Nunes Is the Problem

The following commentary by Liz Mair was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website February 9, 2018:

One of President Trump’s closest allies has poisoned what could have been a productive civil liberties discussion.

Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty

Last week, a now infamous memo authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, probably President Trump’s closest congressional ally when it comes to trying to taint efforts to scrutinize alleged links between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, was released, drawing into political debate once again the question of whether the U.S. government has been over-aggressive in surveilling American citizens.

The memo furthered the narrative that excessive spying has been going on, and specifically that in this instance, our government was spying on people for purely political purposes.

The optimistic civil libertarian hopes that one possible upside to the memo’s release might be greater attention focused by the public on how easy it is for the U.S. government to spy on its citizens – even where justified, as it probably was in Page’s situation. (Page has admitted to advising the Kremlin, and the Trump campaign was obviously sufficiently concerned about his Russia activities to distance themselves from him after his July 2016 visit to Moscow).

FISA warrants, let alone normal, harder-to-get warrants, are not required for all surveillance – contrary to popular belief. But even where they are, they are incredibly easy to obtain.

United States Courts data indicate that between 1979 and the end of the Obama administration, only 0.052 percent of FISA warrant applications were rejected. The abuses Edward Snowden brought to light did indeed force some changes in surveillance policy, but the truth is, America has been spying on its own people with relative ease for quite some time now. It would be great if Nunes’ memo forced that fact back into debate within the public square, and provoked some changes – even if those changes wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, benefit Carter Page.

But a big reason for pessimism is the messenger here: Nunes has frankly poisoned what could be a productive and beneficial conversation about civil liberties by trying to pass as some kind of watered-down version of former Rep. Ron Paul while carrying an extensive record of having personally enabled aggressive surveillance by the U.S. government of its own citizens. On surveillance policy, Nunes is the ultimate, typical Beltway politician – say one thing, do another, your own credibility be damned.

In fact, under Nunes’ preferred policies, as indicated by his voting record, the FISA warrant obtained against Carter Page wouldn’t even have been needed in order to monitor his communications with foreign individuals like, say, Kremlin officials.

When Nunes voted in 2007 to permit so-called “warrantless wiretapping” not actually requiring a FISA warrant for surveillance where one party to communication was located overseas, he probably never thought he’d be playing defense for a president whose adviser was, apparently, the target of an actual FISA warrant because of his foreign relationships and whose communication with Russians was probably the major thing the government wanted to take a look at.

He also likely never considered that it could be politically beneficial to him to sound more like Rep. Justin Amash, with whom he recently went head-to-head over government surveillance legislation, where electronic message surveillance was concerned back in the 2000s, or indeed just a few weeks ago, when Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was up for renewal.

After doing some dancing around, Nunes settled on backing legislation on Section 702 that the Brennan Center argued would allow government surveillance of Americans’ electronically-transmitted messages with “no limits.” Along with his colleagues, Nunes issued this listicle attacking Amash’s amendment that would have required a warrant in order to surveil such messages. Nunes supported and applauded the “no limits” legislation’s passage, after having done his part to bring it home.

Yet here we are, with a media firestorm being driven by a longtime defender of aggressive surveillance policies who has demonstrated minimal interest in civil libertarian concerns trying to pass as the alarm bell ringer regarding government spying on Americans. At least Trump himself was able to acknowledge that there might be something “controversial” about what Nunes and so many fellow congressmen wanted to do regarding Section 702 – that is, until he was evidently asked to reverse position because, heck, Trump and his defenders might not want their or any of their associates’ communications ever being collected by big government. But any other American whose emails were collected in without a warrant, “incidentally” or not? That’s a whole different story.

This is the crux of the real Nunes problem. It’s not that he seems to have increasingly positioned himself as someone who will do or say just about anything to curry favor with Trump, protect him, defend him, and so on and so forth – though this is what CNN will focus on, preventing a real debate about surveillance and key reforms from being made.

It’s that he won’t provoke a real discussion about surveillance policy because he frankly does not come to the debate with clean hands, so to speak. He is part of why we are where we are, and few people will or should trust him since he is showing himself to be exactly what Americans, and maybe most especially Trump voters, most hate about politics and politicians: Hypocrites who say one thing and do another, and who continually contradict themselves with a hodgepodge of actions and votes that suggest that nothing they say is a “problem” in terms of government action, policy, or anything else, really, truly is.

If aggressive surveillance, for political ends or otherwise, were a real problem within the “Deep State” then Nunes would be introducing legislation right now to pare back every surveillance power he has ever personally worked to extend to federal government agencies, employees and contractors.

If aggressive surveillance, for political ends or otherwise, is not a real problem, then Nunes would quiet down some about warrants issued with respect to Page – who, again, admitted he has advised the Kremlin and who was considered sufficiently toxic by the Trump campaign specifically because of his July 2016 Moscow visit, that they put major distance between them shortly after Page returned to the U.S.

But have it both ways, Nunes cannot. And unfortunately, while he continues his posturing, we also can’t have a reasonable, serious debate about surveillance policy. This is why he deserves widespread condemnation, not because he looks like a lapdog for a president with a 40 percent approval rating.

View the post here.

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