Ex-GOP lawmaker slams Nunes in op-ed: He’s a ‘partisan hack’

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) is slamming House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) as a “partisan hack” and accusing him of acting like “the chairman of the president’s reelection campaign” by pushing release a classified intelligence memo.

“The Nunes I knew was a purely partisan animal,” Walsh wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “When it comes to exercising good judgment and discharging his duties in service of the Constitution, he’s just not up to the task.”

Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman, said he often clashed with Nunes during his time in Congress. He said Nunes labeled Tea Party members as “obstinate obstructionists on many occasions, trying to bend us to leadership’s will on votes that went against our principles.”

{mosads}

“With Nunes, I found it was all about politics, almost never about policy,” Walsh wrote. “He wants to please whomever he sees as the person or people running the show. Back then, it was House GOP leadership. Now it’s President Trump.”

Walsh blasted Nunes for his “careless and dangerous rush” to release the memo, which House Republicans say contains evidence of bias against Trump in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, as well as allegations that the Justice Department abused its powers in the surveillance of Trump campaign staffer Carter Page.

“Oversight for security threats to this country is too great a responsibility to let committee business devolve into finger-pointing and score-settling along party lines, but that’s exactly where the level of discourse has gone under Nunes’s ‘leadership,’” Walsh wrote.

“He’s not searching for truth, he’s running interference for the White House, abdicating his role as a member of a coequal branch of government, dragging his fellow committee members down with him and exposing House leadership as ineffectual and foolish.”

Trump is planning to approve the release of the memo to the public, according to a senior administration official. CNN reported Thursday that Trump has privately told associates that he believes releasing the memo could be used to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Democrats have authored their own document rebutting the Republican memo, but Republican members of the House Intelligence panel voted against its release earlier this week.