Question Of The Week: Should A House Committee's Credibility Problems End Its Trump-Russia Investigation?

As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Rep. Devin Nunes has led an investigation that, for reasons outlined below, now carries all the credibility of Vladimir Putin's insistence that his government had done nothing to interfere with the presidential campaign. (For more on how Russia meddled in the election and the investigations now underway over possible collusion by Trump associates, click here to receive breaking political news and the White House Patch newsletter, delivered once a day, free, to your inbox. )

Nunes has insisted that his committee be not be burdened by political constraints and will all the information they can that may shed light on whether Donald Trump or anybody on his campaign staff in any way assisted Russia with its election plans. Neither the committee's investigative activities nor the conclusions summing up their findings, he said, will not be designed with any consideration to their likely impact, good or bad, on the president.

After all those assurances and promises of in investigation free of any protections for Trump, Nunes called a news conference on March 22, effectively rendering his promises about the investigation no longer operable.

Nunes did not only hint on that day that his investigation would no longer be independent, he called a news conference to announce that he would be traveling to the White House to inform Trump about information he discovered that provided hard evidence of abuses involving surveillance information related to him and his transition staff. The information was gathered as "incidental collection," the term used for information about Americans that is gathered during legal surveillance of foreign nationals.

Nunes told reporters that he will inform the president of his plans to instruct his committee to investigate any surveillance abuses involving Trump, which would now occur after he shared shared information with Trump about the documents the same documents the committee is to investigate independently.

The day Nunes met with the president was followed by nine more days of actions he took that seemed to expose a puzzling lack of awareness of the seriousness of FBI and Senate investigations focused on Trump and his campaign staff, and provided a very public view of a string of self-destructive decisions that seemed could be made only by someone with remarkably poor judgment.

Or maybe, just perhaps, his actions were part of a brilliant scheme orchestrated to sabotage his own committee's investigation and eliminate any chance it would produce evidence damaging to Trump.

Here's what's been learned publicly, thanks to a report by CNN and mostly to the the investigative skills of reporters at The New York Times:

• Nunes acknowledged, after a CNN report, that he viewed the intelligence reports on White House grounds the night before he went public with the Trump-was-surveilled claims.
• Nunes implied during his first news conference that his sources who provided access to the reports were whistle-blowers he would not name because he felt obligated to protect them. He then either lied or misspoke when he told a Bloomberg reporter that intelligence officials discovered the documents while carrying out their daily duties and decided to arrange to share them with Nunes out of concern about abuses within American spy agencies. No White House staffers were involved, he said.
• The Times provided information about the sources that is at odds with what Nunes told the Bloomberg reporter and more credible. The paper identified two people who helped provide the intelligence reports to Nunes. Both were White House staffers. The Times identified them as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, and Michael Ellis, who now works on national security issues at the White House Counsel's Office.
• After initially claiming that the incidental collection included private Trump communications, he quickly conceded he was uncertain what information about Trump or his associates was captured and he was uncertain whether he saw any information indicating that any that Trump or staff members were on the line of any intercepted call. He seemed to downplay the prevalence of Trump associates who were actually named, saying he was also referring to people in the reports he could identify based on the context of the conversations.

Wherever you stand on questions about whether the Trump campaign coordinated efforts with Russia to interfere with the election, it's clear that the House committee that's supposed to come up with answers has taken a credibility hit.

Which brings us to this question:

What's the best way to get to the truth about whether Trump or any member of his campaign assisted Russia's efforts to interfere with the 2016 eletion?

Vote here and share your thoughts in comments below.

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Photo: Drew Angerer / Getty Images New