Rep. Devin Nunes has tendered his resignation from a House Intelligence Committee investigation of whether members of the Trump transition team had ties to the Russian government.
According to Nunes’s statement, offered early Thursday, he is under investigation by the House Committee on Ethics, for having disclosed the existence of a supposed-to-be-secret FISA warrant, during a conversation with the press last month.
He will continue to lead the House Intelligence Committee.
Nunes told reporters back in March that the Obama Administration had picked up information on Trump transition members “incidentally,” while listening in on conversations between foreign officials.
Its still not clear that the FISA warrant vindicates Donald Trump, who alleged in a Tweet that Obama had bugged Trump Tower, but certainly raised questions as to what was going on during the transition period, as well as who Nunes’s sources were in the intelligence community – and whether he revealed classified information when he spoke to the media about his findings.
Left-leaning groups like MoveOn.org and Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington immediately filed claims with the Office of Congressional Ethics, claiming that Nunes had violated the Espionage Act. But it was actually the House Ethics Committee, a more powerful and selective body that requires a complaint from a House member to initiate an investigation, that declared that there needed to be a probe in to what Nunes knew and when he knew it.
Nunes, for his part, blamed MoveOn.org and others in his resignation letter, calling them “leftwing activist groups” and the investigation “entirely false and politically motivated.” He went on to say that he will meet with the HEC and OEC “at the earliest possible opportunity in order to expedite the dismissal of these false claims.”
Nunes will stay at the helm of the House Intelligence Committee, but Reps. Mike Conaway, Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney will take over investigating whether Donald Trump’s team talked to Russia ahead of moving into the White House, and whether the Obama Administration inappropriately spied on Trump’s activities.
This isn’t much of a win for opponents of Nunes’s investigation: Gowdy and Rooney are both seasoned at probing the Obama Administration, and Gowdy led the charge against Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Gowdy, though, also chairs the HEC, so the logistics of the situation may prove difficult.