Republican Rep. Devin Nunes has found himself in a world of trouble that he clearly wasn’t prepared for thanks to the public impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.
In a situation where he almost assuredly expected to only defend the president with long, drawn-out sermons about Trump nudes, Nunes found himself deeply implicated in Trump’s scheme on a personal level when Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell read into the record a report that exposed Devin’s ties to an indicted former henchman of Rudy Giuliani’s — Trump’s personal attorney who’s been leading the charge on the Biden investigation in Ukraine that got Trump in all this trouble to begin with.
Since that fateful day in the hearing room, things have gone progressively downhill for the GOP lawmaker and thus far it seems the only response he knows how to give is the same response he gives to anything else that bothers him — an expensive plethora of lawsuits.
The California Republican has filed lawsuits against a menagerie of entities, including ones against the Twitter platform, the anonymous users running the accounts for “Devin Nunes’ Cow” and “Devin Nunes Mom,” a GOP political strategist, various media companies, journalists and progressive watchdog groups, a political research firm that was part of the Clinton 2016 campaign, and a retired farmer in his own home state district.
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The only lawsuit of those listed above that is no longer active is that of Nunes’ campaign against the retired farmer who accused Devin of being a fake farmer.
Nunes has also publicly announced that he will “definitely” be filing additional lawsuits against AT&T, Verizon and House Democrats for releasing the phone records that implicated him in the Ukraine scandal.
Considering Nunes is allegedly living off the salary of a Congressman, which is somewhere around $170,000 a year, give or take a bit, it’s no surprise that Americans are quickly beginning to wonder just where in the hell the funds for all these frivolous lawsuits are coming from.
There aren’t really a plethora of options when it comes to where the money could be coming from. Either he’s footing the bill out of his own pocket, he’s cutting a deal with his attorneys to fork up payments when the dust settles, or he’s blatantly defying House Ethics rules that require him to publicly disclose where the funds are coming from.
Kedric Payne, general counsel for the nonpartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center, a former deputy chief counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics explained that to do things legally Nunes would have to set up a legal defense fund where he could accept free legal services or funding for the lawsuits from a benefactor, as Congress has extremely austere rules against receiving large gifts.
“It would be considered a gift from that benefactor, so the only way he could do it is through a legal defense fund,” Payne stated.
But Devin Nunes has no such fund.
It’s no big secret that lawsuits are not cheap. And Nunes has half a dozen of them going at once with not a legal fund for them in sight.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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