WASHINGTON—When last we saw Congressman Devin Nunes, the hapless chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he was plaintively asking FBI director James Comey to please hurry up with the FBI's probe into possible connections between the Trump campaign and the tangled web of Russian kleptocrats and autocrats that passes for a government over there. He begged Comey to disperse "the big gray cloud" that was hanging over the White House.

On Wednesday, Nunes did everything he could to make the cloud bigger and thicker. From Bloomberg:

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes said Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence community collected multiple conversations involving members of Donald Trump's transition team after he won the election last year. After making his disclosure at the Capitol, Nunes headed to the White House to brief the president on what he had learned. Trump then told reporters gathered for an unrelated event that "I somewhat do" feel vindicated by the latest development. "I very much appreciate the fact that they found what they found."

A whole passel of folks leaped to the electric Twitter machine to explain that Nunes' statement was complete moonshine. And, anyway, what in the name of Henry Clay is Nunes doing briefing the White House on anything? Ostensibly, the committee he chairs is conducting its own investigation into this entire megillah. Why bring a piece of it to the guy whose operatives, past and present, may be the targets of both your investigation, and that of the FBI? And shouldn't we all be a little alarmed that a congresscritter with a security clearance extending into the ionosphere is babbling intelligence information into a bank of microphones?

There's one reason there in the last sentence of the above Bloomberg passage, and that reason was amplified on Wednesday afternoon by Sean Spicer, White House marionette. He leaped to pronounce the president* vindicated by Nunes' remarks, which I would venture a guess was the entire reason Nunes wandered in front of the microphones in the first place. All the president* cares about is seeing his name and the word "vindicated" in reasonable proximity tomorrow morning on some front page or cable news chyron.

I hate to keep drawing the Watergate analogies, but this impresses me as the modern equivalent of Nixon's lunatic proposal to let ancient Senator John Stennis listen to the subpoenaed White House tapes and report his findings to the country. Strong men have been fatally wounded in the hunt for the elusive alibi.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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