NUNES HAS A NICKNAME for nearly everyone: Baby Cat, Deep State Bill, Deep State Lisa, and Andy Land—that’s how he’s going to refer to and acknowledge the four Objective Medusa team members who couldn’t be named as sources in the investigation of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.
Nunes thanks them and nearly everyone else he can think of. The two retired senior army intelligence officers who are among his closest advisers, HPSCI Republicans and their staff, task force members and their staff, the entire House Republican Conference, and everyone else who supported their efforts.
He has particularly warm words for his late staff director, Damon Nelson, who died in November. “I have lost one of my oldest friends,” he said at the time. “He dedicated nearly his entire adult life to public service.”
“Losing Damon was a real blow to us,” says Langer. “On the staff level, he was our leader; he kept the whole thing together. Without him, we wouldn’t have accomplished what we did. He was thrown into a tornado, but he handled it all with grace and class.”
Nunes pours a glass of wine, raises it, and makes sure everyone else’s glass is filled, too. Another bottle comes to the table. The Nunes party is seated in the back of the second-floor dining room of the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican social club a few blocks from the congressman’s Longworth office.
“This is where Gingrich kicked off the Republican revolution in ’94,” says Nunes. And it’s where the Objective Medusa team walks offstage after nearly two years of fighting unelected bureaucrats who tried to overturn the results of an election and hid their plot behind classified intelligence and a secret court.
“Maybe we’ll have a reunion in five years,” says Patel.
“I doubt I’ll ever do anything as significant,” says Jim. “What we uncovered is worth thousands of conservative articles about the dangers of the administrative state. We showed what they actually do.” He adds, “I didn’t know we’d be the tip of the spear in the battle for the republic.”
“I thought it was going to be a pretty high profile investigation, at least in government circles,” says Patel. “What I didn’t know—”
“—is that it was going to be the main news story,” says Langer.
“Right,” says Patel. “I didn’t know that we would be at the center of the media cycle over the next twenty-four months.”
Langer thinks it will be hard for the press to recover. “The last few years showed that America’s biggest media outlets can’t be trusted,” he says. “They discarded ages-old journalistic conventions designed to keep reporting accurate, while they hyped leaks of badly spun or outright false information—all just to damage the Trump presidency.”
Nunes had come to see the press’s actions as a cue to keep pushing forward. “The easiest way to cover all this up would have been for them to ignore our work,” he says. “But the more they hit me, the more I knew we were over the target.”
Before Patel joined the committee, he wasn’t sure he wanted to work on Capitol Hill. “I didn’t even really know what HPSCI was,” says the former prosecutor. Two years later, he’s proud that the investigation fulfilled the committee’s constitutional mandate to provide oversight on behalf of the American public. “I think the investigation was righteous,” he says. “I think we crushed it.”
But it’s still unfinished. “There’s no actual accountability yet,” he says. “When we have that, then I’ll be satisfied.”
Nunes agrees that holding the conspirators responsible for what they did is essential. He has faith in the new attorney general, but there’s a lot that has to be done to set things right. “It’s going to be a long time before the FBI has the confidence of at least half of America—conservatives, including members of Congress,” he says. “The fact that Comey was investigating a presidential campaign. They do it behind Congress’ back by not briefing us. And then when we started looking at it, they come after people personally to threaten them. In my case, they spent over ten million dollars to try to cover this up.”
Taking fire for two years has affected the congressman. He acknowledges that he has become harder—not cynical, exactly, but better prepared to see things he missed before, darker things. It’s still hard for him to believe that Americans did this to other Americans.
Patel is less surprised. He already knew there were some FBI agents who lied and that a select few filling the senior levels at DOJ hold themselves above the law they’re sworn to uphold. He was prepared not only to see it but to explain it as well. “When they interview you for a job as a public defender,” he says, “one of the first things they ask is, ‘Are you prepared to call federal law enforcement officials liars in court?’ I said, ‘Yes. If that’s what the evidence shows, I’m ready to call them liars.’”
Someone talks about reforming the FISA court, and Nunes agrees that that’s the very least DOJ has to do. “They’re going to have to admit that the FISA process was abused,” he says. “And there are going to have to be new laws. The easiest call is that there has to be a representative at the secret court for any American they’re thinking of getting a FISA warrant on. If not, they’ll do this again.”
But it’s unlikely that Republican loyalists will be in a position to punish the next Democratic White House in retaliation for what Obama officials and Clinton operatives did to Trump and his team.
“These bureaucracies are basically all run by Democrats,” says Nunes.
“They’re institutionalists,” says Jim.
And the institutions they serve and protect are appendages of a larger organism. Trump calls it the Swamp, but it’s more like a living thing. Evidence is that it rose to defend itself when Michael Flynn threatened to starve it. The Crossfire Hurricane group was part of a whole, the particular instrument used against Trump.
“They had the whole system wired,” says Nunes of the small FBI group at the center of the coup. “That’s why they wanted this to be a counterintelligence investigation—because there’s no checks and balances to it. They all knew what they had to do to get this rolling.”
“Deep State” is another way to describe what classical philosophers meant by the word “regime.” It refers not only to a form of government but also to the values and virtues that form of government prizes and the leading persons who embody them. Thus, many of the leading persons of the United States’ political bureaucracy had starring roles in the coup.
There was CIA director John Brennan, a Beltway careerist who used his agency’s authority to credential a conspiracy theory.
And James Comey, the former prosecutor who kicked off the series of obstruction traps set to bring down the president.
His predecessor at the FBI, Robert Mueller, managed the coup until he was stopped.
But no one represented this establishment, its arrogance and corruption, more perfectly than Hillary Clinton. That’s why her loss made the regime even fiercer. If she didn’t get what she believed she was entitled to, all of their privileges and prerogatives were vulnerable.
Clinton was the operation’s center of gravity. Not only was it first conducted on her behalf, but her fears gave it form: fear that she wouldn’t get into the White House, fear that the dirt on her would go public.
Had Clinton won, the operation would have been buried and no one would ever have known what had happened. But there were additional factors that had to fall into place for the plot against Trump to be uncovered. The Objective Medusa team had to be there.
Nunes, a California farm kid who didn’t know better than to speak his mind and tell the truth, had to be head of the House Intelligence Committee. And there had to be that staff—Nelson and Langer and Jim and the rest—and Nunes had to know how to keep them inspired to manage the kind of crisis that no one had ever seen before. And that team needed Patel, a fast-talking outer-borough New Yorker who knew where to find things and liked kicking in doors.
Take away any of those factors, and the United States would have been one step closer to becoming a third-world, one-party security state.
“There was no one coming in behind us,” says Patel.
And next time there may not be anyone taking the lead. The struggle for America will outlast what eight people accomplished in helping to put down a coup. Even now, some of their victory is still buried under the same classifications used to obscure the abuses and crimes committed during the plot against Trump.
Yet the Objective Medusa team finished the job it had set out to do. “We just can’t show it yet,” Patel says. “But we cut off the head.”