Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) earlier this month made an unusual trip to the United Kingdom that was reportedly to gather up dirt on Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who wrote the infamous "golden shower" dossier on President Donald Trump's purported relationship with Russia.
As The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand reports, Nunes went to the U.K. hoping to meet with officials at intelligence agencies MI6, MI5, and GCHQ to get more information on Steele's career.
However, officials at these agencies rebuffed his overtures, Bertrand's sources say, because they feared he was only there to "stir up controversy." Instead, he only wound up meeting with the U.K.’s deputy national security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri.
Nunes has long been a lightning rod for criticism in his efforts to run a parallel investigation aimed at exposing the purported "deep state" officials who have supposedly been trying to frame Trump for conspiring with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Earlier this year, he released a controversial memo that even Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano panned for "under-delivering" on its goal of vindicating President Donald Trump.
In fact, the Nunes memo undermined his own attacks on the origins of the Mueller probe because it revealed that Steele's controversial dossier was not the reason that the FBI originally started investigating the Trump campaign's alleged ties to Russia.