Nunes should be investigated for ethics violations after bombshell report revealing his Ukraine ties: columnist

On Saturday, writing for Washington Monthly, columnist David Atkins highlighted the severity of the accusations against Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) — and called on House Democrats to take disciplinary action against him.

Much of the Ukraine scandal is now broadly in the open, wrote Atkins — Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election as the Obama administration ousted a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor to strengthen Ukraine's democracy. That interference got Trump elected. Trump then parroted Russian propaganda that Ukraine was behind the interference, and pursued a bribery scheme by withholding military aid to get Ukraine's new leadership to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden for his role in ousting that prosecutor — which has become the focus of the impeachment inquiry.

"That’s what we knew so far," wrote Atkins. "What we didn’t know is that Ranking Member Nunes — who was supposedly acting simply as Trump’s main defender in Congress during the inquiry — was allegedly an active participant in the scheme, and, while he was still Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, tried to work with the very same corrupt prosecutor opposed by the Obama Administration in order to secure a politically motivated attack on Joe Biden. In short, Nunes used his official position as the Chairman of a Congressional Committee on Intelligence to pressure a foreign government into peddling a false conspiracy theory backed by Russia to obfuscate its crimes against the American people, their government, and the norms of democracy itself."

House Democrats, wrote Atkins, need to take immediate action against Nunes. "The first and most obvious step is to insist that Devin Nunes ought not to be Ranking Member of HPSCI, and should be subject to whatever ethics inquiries are appropriate for this situation. The second would be to put the brakes on the desire to wrap up the impeachment inquiry as soon as possible and figure out just how deep into the Republican establishment the Ukraine conspiracy narrative goes."

"It sounds like a paranoid fever dream, but it seems increasingly like the truth: the entire Republican Party has bought into propaganda produced by Russia in order to blame its crimes on a long-suffering nation-state with whom it is at war, and manufacture false dirt on a political opponent in order to keep themselves in power," concluded Atkins. "This has been ongoing for years, and not just in the Oval Office but among some of the highest-ranking Republicans in Congress. The rot runs very deep, indeed."