Normally I post live videos in the paid members section only after they’ve aired, but I felt like this discussion I had Friday with
of the new Telos News is important. We talked extensively about what happens to powerful interests when you stand up to them.You should catch the whole discussion, I’ve long been a fan of Lizza’s writing and reporting, his ability to capture powerful people at their core — the essence of good reporting on our elected officials.
If you haven’t yet, take some time to read his entire blockbuster dispatch on how he beat a spurious lawsuit from Devin Nunes regarding
We talked extensively about all that Lizza learned in a six-year legal battle, which ultimately confirmed in testimony that the Nunes family did indeed use undocumented immigrants.
And yes, indeed, I did call then-Rep. Devin Nunes a “fake congressman”.
To his face.
Right as he was walking into the House chamber back in 2017. (No tweeting junk, no hiding. If you’re gonna do it, you should do it right.)
I’d been covering him almost daily for about a half a year at that point on the Trump-Russia investigation. And we usually had professional, if occasionally tense, exchanges. He was angry about something and said he was done talking until I revealed a source behind a story, (a source he was convinced was Andrew Weissman.) I told him no.
He called me “Fake news.” So I called him a “Fake congressman.”
You can be a professional or a meme. This world, the stakes, the import, it all demands the best of us, including putting bullies in their place. (I’m sure I bumped into Nunes a few more times around the Capitol after that, but never asked for an apology, nor did he seek one. He knows the game, we all do.)
I thought of this because Nunes sat through Lizza’s deposition into the Nunes undocumented immigrants lawsuit. What was his purpose in being there? Intimidation? Perhaps, though it clearly didn’t work.
This style of lawfare, as Lizza reports, is meant to silence, to make it harder to hold the powerful to account, to report what is real. (Among the interesting finds, I thought, was how utterly normal it is for a farm in northwest Iowa, where the Nunes family farm is, to rely on undocumented immigrants for work.)
When political lawyers like Biss files these lawsuits, they take time, and often time is all that’s needed to wear people down.
I thought of this last week as the former CPAC finance director was acquitted on charges in Alexandria. The trial ultimately revealed that the deputies to longtime CPAC president Matt Schlapp (and the city prosecutor) did not have the evidence to back up the charges.
The defense, including a team of former CPAC staffers who left amid the 2023 sexual assault allegations against Schlapp — which were settled with no finding of wrongdoing — brought receipts, lots of them. Items which are now entered in evidence in the public record.
But it took two years to get there, from the staff exodus to the criminal charges to the (ultimately speedy) court trial.
Keep an eye out for more Substack Lives this week.
Cheers,
Tom L.
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