Today, Explained - Showdown at High Nunes

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

California Republican Devin Nunes spent much of the last two weeks mocking the impeachment inquiry. After allegations surfaced that he may have been involved with Ukraine, he now finds himself caught up in it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, ever since I had a septuagenarian on the show last week talking about KiwiCo in one of our ads, people have been saying, I had no idea that KiwiCo made stuff for adults. Well, KiwiCo does. You can try out your first month on KiwiCo for free right now at KiwiCo.com slash explained. It was hard to not feel a little cognitive dissonance watching those impeachment hearings the last two weeks. You'd hear the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, say something like, Are we prepared to accept that a president of the United States can leverage official acts, military existence, White House meetings to get an investigation of a political rival? And then you'd hear ranking member Devin Nunes respond with something like,

They got caught trying to obtain nude photos of President Trump from Russian pranksters. Throughout the two weeks of Telvai's testimony, it always seemed like the ranking Republican, Devin Nunes, was chasing a completely different story. Like he had zero interest in the story about the Trump administration that was being presented to him. And then right as the proceedings were wrapping up on Friday, Devin Nunes became a part of that story he wasn't interested in. Which is actually not that unusual for him.

Marisa Lagos co-hosts Political Breakdown. It's a podcast from KQED in San Francisco. The congressman, who is from California's Central Valley, essentially was accused first in a Daily Beast story that Lev Parnas, one of those indicted associates of Rudy Giuliani, essentially said that he had helped arrange meetings and calls for the congressman with some Ukrainians. Another of Parnas' lawyers, Ed McMahon, told the Daily Beast earlier this week that Parnas, quote, helped arrange meetings and calls in Europe for Representative Devin Nunes in 2018. Nunes' aide, Derek Harvey, participated in the meetings, the lawyer said, which were arranged to help Nunes' investigative work. And then there was some congressional records showing that Nunes indeed did travel to Europe last November, early December with some of his aides on the taxpayer's dime, which I think we should note.

And it's an interesting timeframe, right, because at that point, Democrats had taken back the House at the polls but hadn't actually been sworn in. So he was still in the majority party at that time. So there was, you know, not a lot of oversight from the minority party, which was about to assume the majority. What exactly is Lev Parnas trying to suggest Representative Nunes was doing in Ukraine? Well, at first it was a little unclear, but over the weekend there was some other reporting and a couple of his attorneys have essentially come forward to a couple of different news outlets and said that Nunes asked Parnas to hook him up with that former Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was a symbol of hiding corruption and supporting corruption, especially high-rank corruption in Ukraine.

Who has been sort of the center of a lot of these questions around the Bidens and whether Shokin, you know, who is widely seen as corrupt by the West, had been investigating Biden and other Western leaders. And, you know, as I said, it's clear that Nunes did take a trip to Europe around this time frame. But, you know, this is all basically on the word of the attorneys for a guy who is indicted on campaign finance fraud charges right now. Right. So the insinuation is that Representative Nunes may have also been seeking help in investigating the Bidens? Yeah. I mean, we know that he's one of, you know, President Trump's strongest allies in Congress. These allegations would indicate that even as he's

been, you know, the ranking member sort of helping preside over these impeachment inquiry hearings and really calling them completely ridiculous the whole time, that he perhaps a year ago was actually the one, not Rudy Giuliani, but the one going to Europe to try to encourage an investigation of the Bidens. And of course, you know, Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and that energy company, Burisma. So as bad as that could be for Representative Nunes, the flip side is it's coming from someone who doesn't exactly have a sterling record of credibility. Yeah, that's totally true. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of sort of tainted folks within this entire process. And so essentially one of Parnas' lawyers is saying,

hey, we'd love to testify about this in front of the Intelligence Committee, which I think raises questions about what he might hope to get in exchange for that. Of course, he's being prosecuted by the federal government. This is Congress. They are separate. The Department of Justice, you know, is part of the Trump administration. So it's very messy, Sean. If this turns out to be true, could Nunes have just avoided all this by saying, hey, by the way, let's just get this out there. I also went to Ukraine for a minute and had a conversation, but it's all good. Nothing happened. Here we are. I guess maybe, but from what has been reported so far,

and if you look at the timing, it looks like he specifically did it at a time frame when he thought he wouldn't be caught. So that doesn't always bode well, right? If you are sort of building in, hiding something. And I think that this gets to the sort of crux of these impeachment questions, which is like, is there any situation where it's okay to enlist a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political opponent? Like, maybe, but it's, I think the fact that it seemed to have happened, if it did happen on the public's dime, is also going to be really sticky for him. So this news broke on Friday. It's Monday. What has Representative Nunes said about it since then? He criticized all the outlets who've reported this as fake news. Uh-oh. Yeah, he's never been particularly fond of the news, let's say. The media has become totally corrupt, but now they're willing to actually engage and help with criminals,

indicted criminals. He's been threatening lawsuits. We are going to take both CNN and the Daily Beast likely into federal court right after Thanksgiving. And I think sort of denied it, but it took him a while to get to that point on Fox. So I think it's a little unclear. And he's sort of promising more details to come in his lawsuits and other responses. We're going to file all this. Everyone's going to know the truth. Everybody's going to know all the facts. But I think you can understand that I can't compete by trying to trying to debate this out with the public media when 90 percent of the media are totally corrupt. So he hasn't come out and just flat out denied it. He has promised further action,

further information, and is suing CNN. I don't know if he's filed a lawsuit yet, but he is certainly threatening to, and that would not be out of the norm for Devin Nunes. What do you mean? So he's been very sue-happy lately. He has sued a farmer in his district and two other folks who actually went to court asking that Nunes not be allowed to be called a farmer on the ballot last year. They felt like it wasn't accurate because he's not really farming anymore. He sued a couple of anonymous Twitter users who ran parody accounts against him, including one that's at Devin Cow. They wrote,

Devin's boots are full of manure, he's utterly worthless, and it's pastor time to move him to prison. And one of the people involved in that is a Republican consultant, if you can believe that, who he thinks is responsible for some of these parody accounts. He has gone after the Fresno Bee, which I think it's worth noting until this past cycle had actually endorsed Nunes every

time, but has done some reporting on some of the financial interest in his winery and some of the bad behavior by those folks. And he has basically accused them of smearing him. He's gone after another journalist, Ryan Lizza from Esquire, who did a really interesting story about Nunes and how basically his family dairy farm is not actually in California anymore. It's in Iowa. So, yeah, he's he is happy to go to court when he feels like people have defamed him. In none of these cases has he been successful yet. But actually, some of them are still moving their way through the system. But, you know, I think there's an argument to be made that some of these could be viewed as frivolous. With the president and aligned with this Republican cohort who sees these Democratic proceedings, this impeachment inquiry as a total farce, as a shambles.

How do people back in Devin Nunes' home district see him right now? That is where I think it gets really interesting. He is basically been sort of embraced as a hometown hero by farmers in his district. You know, he does come from a dairy farming family. And I mean, I think people, a lot of people, not everybody, but by his argument that it is a conspiracy against him by the media, that he is sort of doing right by his district. He's been really strong on farmers' water rights, which is basically like the issue in the Central Valley. And I think that a lot of times what we hear from folks is like, that's what we care about. All this other stuff is noise.

You know, it's the left-wing media trying to tear him down. And he's won. I mean, he only won by five points last time, which was a pretty dramatic difference in that district has a Republican registration advantage. So he's gotten more real challenges in the past couple of years, but he seems to still be really well liked in this district, which is fascinating, especially in part because it's very heavily Latino. And we know in 2018 that Latino turnout actually helped Democrats flip a lot of other districts around the state that had been held by Republicans. But they have not had success with this one yet. Although I should say they are going to target it again. Tell us a little bit more about his district.

It is farmland. I mean, this is the Central Valley. It includes Fresno, but also parts of Tulare County, which is, I think, sort of even more rural. Fresno is kind of, you know, one of the population centers in the Central Valley. And it is a very different place than the coast in California. I mean, we think of California as such a blue place, but if you go east a couple hours, it's farmland, it's heartland. It is largely very conservative. And again, like people who I think understandably more concerned with their bottom line, especially as farmers, which is a tough industry to begin with, than, you know, what's happening thousands of miles away in D.C. or quite frankly, a couple hundred of miles away in like San Francisco or Los Angeles. And did Nunes grow up a farmer? Does he actually have a claim to that cohort?

They did farm. His family does still own dairy farms, but in Iowa. So, I mean, that's part of the reason that you've seen, like, folks who oppose him come out and say, hey, why do you get to say farmer on the ballot? Like, you're not really a farmer. I mean, he has really been, as an adult, a politician. I mean, he did go to ag school. He had run when he was in school for, like, the board of his college because he was worried that they were going to shut down their farmland that kids trained on, when in fact they said, no, we're actually just trying to buy a bigger place. So it's sort of

like a conspiracy theory launched him into his first political office, which is pretty fitting because that's sort of like his vibe. I mean, he's always been very much like on the outskirts of the mainstream sort of assumptions. And it's not just like a Republican Democratic thing. Even when Republicans were in charge of Congress and, you know, he's on the Intelligence Committee, there's a lot of anecdotes about him sort of listening to one person in the field who contradicts what the entire intelligence community is saying. And Republicans really getting frustrated with him over that. So like I think that there was something, especially with Trump, that they saw eye to eye on from the get go and really sort of bonded over, which was like this distrust of the system and this idea that everyone's out to get you and that there's

something like whatever the establishment thinks is the case, there's probably something different about it. I mean, he's always had that sort of skepticism and I think some people would say paranoia about the intelligence community, about D.C., about the media. This is all in line with sort of his approach to politics and I would say probably life. Devin Nunes constantly casting doubt on the legitimacy of our institutions isn't just a one-off. In a minute, Fox's David Roberts argues it's part of a grand old plan.

I'm Sean to go. but we didn't talk about the particulars. You started with a pinball machine? With a pinball machine. So, you know, probably collectively, if I hadn't been interrupted, probably took two or three hours to put together. But that particular thing, and I don't know, as I said, what next is coming, was really quite durable. I was quite surprised when it all got tied and snapped together. And I've got almost a four-year-old grandson and a seven-year-old granddaughter. And they're not always too gentle, but they've been playing with the thing and enjoying the heck out of it. And the best part is you now have a subscription to these KiwiCo projects, and there will be more.

Yes. And my wife wasn't too pleased. She said, well, you're going to store all this stuff. That's my problem, not hers. David Roberts, you write about energy and politics for Vox, and you recently kind of wrote about how people are running out of energy to participate in our politics. You wrote that we're undergoing an epistemic crisis. What does that mean? Epistemology is the philosophical term for the branch of philosophy that's about knowing things, about knowledge, about how we gain knowledge, about how we assess knowledge, what is evidence, what's the difference between truth and opinion? All those related questions in philosophy are known as epistemology. And so, when I say an epistemic crisis, I mean a

crisis in the way that we collectively come to know things, i.e., we don't seem to collectively come to know things anymore. It seems we are now have been kind of hived into two separate epistemic communities who know different things, trust different sources of information, have different procedures for evaluating knowledge, and just are increasingly unable to communicate across that chasm. And I think that would sound or seem familiar to anyone who watched the impeachment hearings. California Representative Schiff leading the charge for one community and California Representative Nunes leading the charge for the other. And these two representatives of the same state may as well have been from different planets.

And you argue this particular phenomenon is something called tribal epistemology. What's that about? Sure. Well, the term tribal epistemology is just meant to sort of indicate a situation where the kind of dictates and interests of your tribe, in this case, meaning sort of the right wing tribe in the U.S., what you come to know and how you come to know things is dictated by the interests of your tribe rather than vice versa. You believe what's good for your tribe to believe and disbelieve what's not good for your tribe to believe.

This isn't something that Trump invented, right? How exactly did we get to this crisis that you write about? Sure. It's been ongoing for decades, but I really think Mitch McConnell, Republican Senate leader, is a politician who, almost more than any other contemporary politician, has realized what's going on and how to use it to his advantage. So he realized before Obama even took office, people aren't paying close attention to politics. And they have a kind of these basic heuristics they apply to politics. And one of them is if something is legitimate, if an idea or proposal is legitimate, it will get some agreement on both sides of the aisle. It will command some consensus.

That's sort of like a signal of legitimacy to everybody, really. It's really deep in us to think that way. And so what Mitch McConnell realized was, well, all I have to do to prevent Obama from being able to command consensus or get cooperation on both sides is just deny cooperation. I can single-handedly make him look polarizing. I can make him look divisive just by refusing to go along with him. One of the most fascinating stories about Nixon's impeachment is Roger Ailes even, or one of those right-wing figures, was actually in Nixon's administration and said, if you had a network of your own, we could get through this, like almost verbatim. Ever since then, they've basically more and more come to view mainstream institutions, that's the mainstream media,

the mainstream science, the academy, you name it, as their enemy, as members of the other side, right? So they have decided we need to build institutions of our own, basically. So they have built a kind of parallel set of think tanks and academic institutions and media. So now you have this sort of separate epistemic tribe with its own sources of information, its own history, its own principles, its own science, I mean, its own sort of freestanding world. You know, pre-Trump, I think, they felt the need to sort of keep a foot in the old world or at least speak the language of mainstream institutions or sort of speak a language that gave their kind of tribal reasoning a kind of plausible deniability, a sheen of being something else. But what Trump has done is render

that impossible because any sort of principle you stake your claim on, he'll violate the next day. I mean, we've seen it over and over again. They keep trying to sort of tell a story about why, you know, why his behavior is okay, and he'll come out the following day and just stomp all over the story. So even this notion that we need to sort of like frame these beliefs in a way that's plausible given the old standards has kind of faded away and it's just become a much more naked thing. Things are bad, but our lawmakers used to shoot each other and you see legislative sessions in other countries descend into straight up brawls. But still, you argue that this is a crisis that could like make or break our democracy? I'm only, you know, about halfway sure of that. I

mean, I've been watching, you know, politics for the last several decades, and I keep thinking like this, this will be the moment it reaches a boil. Like this is the crisis point. Something's got to break. Something's got to give. But it just like keeps going on and on. So I should say like, maybe not, maybe this isn't the crisis, but it feels to me like a combination of the stakes, right? I mean, this is like the third impeachment trial of a president in American history, it's a really big deal. And what's more, Trump's guilt in what he's being accused of is just so obvious at this point. It's almost comically obvious. We've got like multiple witnesses. Multiple administration officials have admitted to it on camera.

Did he also mention to me in the past that the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that's it. And that's why we held up the money. Before they later came and scrambled and tried to take it back. We have a significant reversal now from the White House, a new statement from Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney saying, once again, the media has decided to misconstrue my comments to advance a biased and political witch hunt against President Trump. Let me be clear. There was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election. He himself admitted to it on camera on those on the White House lawn. We had a great conversation.

The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place, was largely the fact that we don't want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating the corruption already in the Ukraine. And did it again. Solicited help from foreign powers investigating his opponent to help his political run. Likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens. Because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.

He did it on camera in front of all of us. So to me, it just seems like if even this can't break people out of their us versus them, our tribe versus their tribe sort of fixation, then it really seems like nothing can. And furthermore, the conservative movement is going to see what happened with Mueller, and then it's going to happen again with impeachment. They're just going to learn again that there's no reason not to make stuff up. It's become so much easier to lie and get the lie out in front of millions of people. I mean, it's literally now easier to get a lie in front of millions of people than it is to get a truth in front of millions of people. And Representative Nunes actually pinned the entire weight of these proceedings on exactly how many people were watching, as if the only possible metric of the importance of the entire impeachment inquiry would be how many people were watching it on TV. Well, Ambassador and Mr. Morrison, I have some bad news for you. TV ratings are way down, way down. I don't hold it personally. I

don't think it's you guys. Whatever drug deal the Democrats are cooking up here on the dais, American people aren't buying it. I should say millions upon millions of people were watching this on TV. So he was, again, misleading at least some American people because some American people are inclined to believe the ranking Republican member on the House Intelligence Committee. What is the antidote to this moment we're in, to this tribal epistemology? The antidote to Nunes is for institutions to do their job. That's sort of the key crisis I'm trying to describe here is like this is, this looks to me like U.S.s institutions just like their last gas their last chance to sort of behave the way they're supposed to but the institutions are weak

sean i don't know if you've noticed this but like our institutions are weak and they've been under constant assault you know like the media is a great example it's just been under constant unremitting assault from the right for decades now, and it has been beaten into this position of sort of terrified hesitance and sort of refusal to sort of draw clear lines or say this is true and this isn't. So the institutional checks that used to sort of keep this behavior limited in its impact, at least, are weakened and dying. So that's just one of many, many, many reasons. You know, whenever Trump's gone, whenever this country thinks about how to sort of rebuild and revive itself, we've got to sort of recapture the value of these norms of just like fact-checking of like evidence and, you know, respect for principles. Even if they work against the interests of your tribe, you're beholden to them.

This sense that we are, all of us beholden to some principles higher than partisanship, we've got to restore that sense somehow. All of politics is suffering from the lack of it. Whether you're 7 going on 8 or 79 going on 80, KiwiCo would like to give you the chance to try out their fun and engaging and educational projects for free. To redeem the offer, you can type in k-i-w-i-c-o dot c-o-m slash e-x-p-l-a-i-n-e-d.