How far has House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) fallen? Consider Rep. Ted Yoho’s (R-Fla.) appearance on MSNBC this morning.
“You have to keep in mind who [Nunes] works for,” Yoho told MSNBC. “He works for the president and answers to the president.”MSNBC’s Craig Melvin asked Yoho whether the committee chairman actually worked for his constituents, and not the executive branch. “You do both,” Yoho said.
To gain access to the building, Nunes would need to have been cleared by a White House staffer. It’s not clear who that was; on Wednesday, press secretary Sean Spicer said he is looking into who it may have been — something that those familiar with the process suggest should only take a few moments of effort. It’s also not clear with whom Nunes met, although he described his source for the information to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake as an “intelligence official” and not a White House staffer.
This is more straightforward than it may seem. If a member of Congress, right now, wanted to stop by the White House, he or she couldn’t just walk up to the front door and knock. Security is tight, and every visitor needs to be signed in. Nunes is no exception: a staffer had to alert the Secret Service that the committee chairman was on the way, so that when he arrived, he could enter the complex.I was a lowly and unimportant White House intern a couple of decades ago, and even then, the system was in place. What’s more, if an official wanted to know who signed someone in and when, it would take all of 30 seconds to check the visitor log.When Sean Spicer was asked about this yesterday, he said he’s “asked some preliminary questions,” but hasn’t received answers yet. I suspect every reporter in the briefing room knows that doesn’t make any sense: if the White House press secretary wants to know who signed someone in, he picks up the phone, asks the front desk, and gets an answer literally within moments.As a rule, when Team Trump acts like it has something to hide, it’s because Team Trump has something to hide.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."