Amid the furor of the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, Devin Nunes has stayed the course. He’s used public hearings to promote Republican conspiracy theories. He’s sat in dead-eyed silence in the face of testimony that looks bad for the president. At times, he has simply walked out of the room. Soon, however, a new tribulation could arise to put his determination to the test. According to a top Democrat, Nunes may soon become the subject of an ethics probe following reports that he met with a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor to solicit damaging information about Joe Biden—claims he has denied. “Quite likely,” Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said Saturday of the possibility of an ethics probe into Nunes. “Without question.”

Talk of the possible investigation comes after CNN reported that Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani’s, has information about an alleged meeting in Vienna last year between Nunes and Victor Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general who was forced out in 2016 at the urging of western leaders, including Republican lawmakers, to reform the government in Kiev. (In a July 25 call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump described Shokin as “very good” and called his firing “unfair.”) According to an attorney for Parnas, Shokin told Parnas that he met with Nunes in December 2018 to “discuss digging up dirt” on the former vice president. If Parnas’ claims are true, it would indicate that the effort to smear Biden began earlier than previously known, and that the operation was not limited to Trump administration officials, but included at least one member of Congress.

Nunes, as he is wont, has denied wrongdoing, suggesting CNN’s reporting amounts to “criminal activity.” “Were you in Vienna with Shokin?” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked him Sunday. “I really want to answer these questions,” he replied. “But because there is criminal activity here...I’m not going to sit here and try to compete against the media I have no chance of winning with.”

“Just to be clear,” Bartiromo said. “You’re telling me CNN committed criminal activity?”

“It’s very likely,” Nunes said. “Or they’re an accessory to it.”

Of course, reporting on a public official and asking said official for comment (Nunes declined to respond to CNN’s questions about the matter) is not illegal. But this type of deflection is pretty standard for Nunes, who says he’s suing CNN and the Daily Beast over their stories. (True Nunes fans will recall he filed a lawsuit against Twitter earlier this year because parody accounts posing as his cow and his mother hurt his delicate feelings. As New York magazine writes:

Nunes has previously filed lawsuits against Esquire (over a reported story on Nunes’s family farm), the Fresno Bee (over reporting on untoward behavior at a company Nunes partly owns), [and] Fusion GPS (for its work investigating Trump’s ties to Russia)...Nunes’s lawsuits all share certain characteristics. They make wild charges against their targets, often accusing them of acting in concert with a shadowy anti-Nunes conspiracy, failing to recognize any right of the media to report things Nunes does not wish to be made known, employing hilariously amateurish legal reasoning, while demanding extravagant sums as compensation.

Sadly for Nunes, the theatrics are unlikely to squash probes into his involvement with Parnas, whose lawyer told the Daily Beast that he helped Nunes set up meetings in Europe last year as part of the congressman’s taxpayer-funded investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.

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