Devin Nunes bursts onto scene with controversial role in Russia probe
WASHINGTON — Devin Nunes, now holding nearly daily press conferences, had kept a pretty low profile in Congress since being elected in 2002 to represent a district in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Nunes, 43, has been faulted by Democrats and some Republicans for first briefing President Trump, and not his committee, with information that members of the Trump transition team had been caught up in “incidental” surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies. Trump has used the revelation, based on documents Nunes says he reviewed on White House grounds last week, as a vindication of his accusation that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower last year.
Several prominent Democrats, including the intelligence committee’s ranking member, Adam Schiff of California, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have urged him to recuse himself from the investigation of Trump’s campaign contacts with Russians and Russian meddling in last year’s presidential campaign. Nunes was part of Trump’s transition team.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., compared Nunes’ running of the Russia probe to “sort of an Inspector Clouseau investigation,” and said on NBC’s Today show Tuesday he doubted he could get it “back on track.”
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Nunes is known to return home almost every weekend to his heavily agricultural and forested district in Tulare and Fresno counties. He and lives in the town of Tulare and went to the local high school, then on to the College of the Sequoias for an associate’s degree and then to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture. His family is of Portuguese ancestry and has farmed in the region for three generations.
Nunes’ wife, Elizabeth, is an elementary school teacher, and the couple has three daughters. A practicing Catholic, he regularly attends St. Aloysius Church in Tulare. When he is in town, he often plays Sueca, a bridge-like card game of Portuguese origin, according to Visalia Times-Delta editor Eric Woomer.
He was named to the intelligence panel in 2011 by then-Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and also serves on Ways and Means Committee. By the nature of the classified information it works with, the intelligence committee usually operates in closed session. Chairing the must-see open session with FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency Director Admiral Michael S. Rogers put him center stage in the national spotlight, and he hasn’t been far from it since.