President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Saturday that he would appoint Devin Nunes, a former member of Congress who had used his role as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to try to delegitimize the Trump-Russia investigation, to head an independent advisory board on espionage policy.
The organization — the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — dates back to the early Cold War and consists of private citizens with top-level security clearances who are supposed to help the White House analyze spy agency effectiveness and planning. Its members do not need Senate confirmation, so presidents can pick whomever they want for it.
In a statement, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Nunes — who is currently the chief executive of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the Truth Social platform — for his counterinvestigation into the Trump-Russia inquiry in 2017-18, when Mr. Nunes led the House Intelligence Committee as a Republican congressman from California.
“While continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group, Devin will draw on his experience as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Mr. Trump wrote in his announcement.
Some members of the advisory board also serve on a presidential Intelligence Oversight Board, which was created in the 1970s after a congressional investigation into abuses by national security agencies and which tries to ferret out illegal spying activities. That group typically includes the larger board’s chair, so it is likely that Mr. Nunes will participate in it as well.
The work products of the two boards are usually kept secret. A rare exception came in 2023, when the Biden administration publicly released a report in which the two panels urged Congress to extend an expiring law that authorizes a warrantless surveillance program, but also called for new limits on the F.B.I.’s ability to use information gathered under the program.
Before Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, Mr. Nunes was seen as a fairly mainstream member of the House G.OP. caucus. And the House Intelligence Committee was generally seen as more serious and bipartisan than much of Congress.
But all of that changed starting in 2017, when Mr. Trump became president amid the F.B.I. investigation into Russia’s covert attempt to manipulate the 2016 election and the nature of the ties between his campaign and Moscow. Mr. Trump sought to portray himself as a victim of a “deep state” plot. Mr. Nunes used his position to help him, and soon earned a reputation as a staunch Trump loyalist.
One of Mr. Trump’s early moves was to proclaim, baselessly, that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. No evidence ever surfaced to support that claim, but Mr. Nunes gave Mr. Trump an assist.
In March 2017, a few weeks after Mr. Trump’s claim, Mr. Nunes called a news conference at which he announced that a whistle-blower had shown him materials revealing that the president or his associates might have been incidentally monitored, during the transition, in foreign-targeted surveillance by American spy agencies. He said he intended to inform the White House about it.
But it later emerged that it was the Trump White House that had shown Mr. Nunes those materials — making Mr. Nunes’s misleading performance the butt of jokes.
Mr. Nunes also contended that Obama administration officials had improperly “unmasked” the identities of Mr. Trump’s associates in intelligence reports based on surveillance. Such reports normally do not name any Americans whom foreign targets are talking to or about, but officials can ask for an American’s identity if it would help them better understand a report.
Mr. Trump and other allies picked up on that theme and sought to make it into a scandal. But a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who was assigned to review the matter, John Bash, later concluded that there was nothing irregular, let alone illegal, in the unmasking requests.
Mr. Nunes was forced to step aside from oversight of the Russia investigation for the rest of 2017 during an ethics review of whether he had revealed classified information. But in early 2018, after he had been cleared, he led an effort to portray the actions of investigators scrutinizing Russian election interference as the real scandal.
Mr. Nunes oversaw the production of a memo — based on then-secret material and drafted by a top staff member, Kash Patel, who is now Mr. Trump’s pick to be the next F.B.I. director — that made a series of claims about an October 2016 application to wiretap a former Trump foreign policy adviser with ties to Russia, Carter Page.
The document, which became known as the Nunes Memo, became the subject of a heated partisan fight. Democrats asserted that much of what it claimed was false or misleading, and produced their own memo based on the same underlying materials to rebut it. But Republicans released the Nunes Memo while initially holding back the rebuttal.
The Nunes Memo argued that the F.B.I., as part of its factual basis for seeking approval to wiretap Mr. Page, had cited allegations drawn from a dossier of sketchy claims about Mr. Trump and Russia, written by a research firm that had been indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign. While the scrutiny of Mr. Page was a minor part of the investigation — and the wiretap application was the only part that relied upon the dossier — Mr. Trump and his defenders sought to conflate the dossier and its flaws with the main investigation in the public mind.
The wiretap application and three renewals eventually became public, as did a Justice Department inspector general report about them. The results proved complex.
Viewed at a high level of abstraction, Mr. Nunes might be said to have been vindicated: He had claimed the applications were botched, and that was true. At a more detailed level, he was not: The most serious problems with the applications, which the inspector general report later uncovered, were not in the Nunes Memo. And several key specific claims the memo had made to support its condemnation proved to be false or significantly misleading.
Later, Mr. Nunes also played a significant role in defending Mr. Trump during the inquiry over his withholding of military assistance to Ukraine in a bid to pressure its government to say that Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s likely 2020 rival, was under investigation for corruption. That inquiry led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.
The inquiry unfolded in the Intelligence Committee, which by then was under the control of Democrats, with Representative Adam Schiff of California as chairman. Mr. Nunes organized Republicans into a united front in downplaying what Mr. Trump had done and opposing the impeachment effort.
Along the way and since, Mr. Nunes has repeatedly sued news media organizations and his critics for purported defamation, even going after Twitter, now known as X, in a bid to identify the people behind parody accounts for his mother and his cow. (Mr. Nunes comes from a family of dairy farmers.) His numerous such lawsuits have so far not been successful.
Mr. Nunes also stuck close to Mr. Trump after his term ended. In late 2021, Mr. Nunes announced that he would be leaving Congress after 19 years to become the chief executive of Mr. Trump’s new social media company.
The post Devin Nunes, Pugnacious Trump Loyalist, to Lead Espionage Advisory Board appeared first on New York Times.
