What Harm Has the Nunes Memo Done to Our Democracy

(If you don’t know much about the Nunes memo and haven’t read my previous two posts (here and here), read those first.)

Waiting for the Nunes memo to be published did far more damage to the democracy than did the published memo itself.  In fact, as I emphasized in the last post, there was nothing new in the memo, nothing that had not long-since been discredited. 

That raises two questions:

1.      What was the harm of the memo? and

2.       Why did Devin Nunes, Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee and other Republican members of the committee write it and then wait so long to publish it? 

To recap: Politico first reported on the preparation of the memo on December 20, 2017, but the memo itself was not published until February 2, 2018, almost six weeks later.  During that time, Nunes promised that the memo would be a “bombshell,” proving FBI misconduct. Other Republican Congresspeople said it would show evidence of “treason” on behalf of law enforcement officials.  "I think that this will not end just with firings. I believe there are people [in the FBI or Mueller probe] who will go to jail,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz  The right-wing media jumped in claiming, for instance, that “the FBI has become the secret police,” evidence for a “coup … in America.”

As I showed in my second post on the memo, there is actually nothing of significance in the memo.  Either certain facts were previously known, certain information was just wrong, or other accusations had already been shown to be unimportant. It was the existence of the memo and the advance reporting/misrepresenting) about it that did the damage before it was ever seen or could be evaluated.”  That raises three questions:

1. Why was the memo written?
2. Why weren’t the Democrats on the committee allowed to see it or write a response? And, most importantly,
3. Why did it take six weeks to make public the contents of the memo?

The answers to all three questions are the same: Congressional Republicans wanted six weeks to make charges (in reality, “propaganda”) that they knew to be unfounded, so that no one could refute its claims until the public damage had been done. 

As a result, for six weeks the American public was subjected to charges of FBI misconduct and Mueller-probe bias that, until the publication of the actual memo, could not be refuted. 

The media made sure the yet-unpublished charges had plenty of publicity.  Especially the right-wing media, most especially Fox, reported as if the memo had irrefutable evidence of the misconduct of the FBI and how that evidence would show the bias in the whole Mueller probe.  Listeners would have little reason to doubt the reports.

By the time the memo was published, and the obvious repudiations presented, public attention had moved on.  So the damage to the institutions of national law enforcement had already been done, and refutation of the charges received comparably little attention.  It would be the unproven charges that at least the right-wing public would remember.

Far-right members of Congress weren’t the only guilty ones.  Neither Senate Majority Leader, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, nor Speaker of the House Paul Ryan have made any attempt to discredit the memo.  (Ryan actually defended Nunes although he tried to have it both ways by warning that the memo should not be used to discredit Mueller’s investigation or impugn the FBI, a bizarre claim since that was exactly what the memo did.) 

The Republican leadership allowed Nunes to turn the United States into a country where the institutions of law enforcement became additional pawns in the partisan war.

These men are destroying something that won’t be easily recovered: faith in the idea of impartial law enforcement. It amounts to an assault on the rule of law,

wrote the editors of the Washington Post.**

Polls have shown that the Republican efforts have had a profound effect on public perceptions.  A poll in 2015 found that nearly 84 percent of Republicans said that they had a “favorable” view of the FBI, not surprising given the long-held Republican support for law enforcement.  A similar poll last month, however, showed a complete reversal, now almost 75% of Republicans believe the FBI and Justice Department are trying to undermine US President Donald Trump.

This is not just the usual political warfare.  David Kris, former assistant attorney general for national security writes:

[T]he Nunes memo is different because it so clearly abandons procedural regularity and any pretense of bipartisanship, and because Chairman Nunes has not seriously engaged with the agencies his committee purports to oversee. He has, in effect, both assumed bad faith on the part of the intelligence community, and arguably practiced it himself. That kind of behavior may generate short-term political gains, but it is highly corrosive to the paradigm of intelligence under law that we have used to govern ourselves for the past 40 years.

While we have come to accept even these tactics from the far-right, this effort had the support of the Republican leadership.  Either Ryan or McConnell could have shot it down. Although there were a few Republicans senators—Arizona’s John McCain, Susan Collins of Maine, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Charlie Dent from Pennsylvania—who condemned the memo and several others who counseled patience, very few congressional Republicans spoke out against the memo.

 The reality, then, is that the Republican Party and its leaders have—for purely political reasons—intentionally undermined the nation’s trust in our national law enforcement agencies by supporting information they knew (or should have known) to be false. 

The Republican attack on the FBI and the intelligence agencies crosses a dangerous line: Institutions critical to the maintenance of our democracy are being torn apart by the very officials elected and sworn to protect them.   

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**This is certainly not due solely to the Nunes memo but also to the months-long Republican attack on the Mueller probe and the FBI.