WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump announced Saturday that he would appoint Devin Nunes, a former member of Congress who had used his role as chair of the House Intelligence Committee to try to delegitimize the Trump-Russia investigation, to head an independent advisory board on espionage policy.

The organization — the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — dates back to the early Cold War and consists of private citizens with top-level security clearances who are supposed to help the White House analyze spy agency effectiveness and planning. Its members do not need Senate confirmation, so presidents can pick whomever they want for it.

In a statement, Trump praised Nunes — who is currently the CEO of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the Truth Social platform — for his counterinvestigation into the Trump-Russia inquiry in 2017-18, when Nunes led the House Intelligence Committee as a Republican congressman from California.

“While continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group, Devin will draw on his experience as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Trump wrote in his announcement.

Some members of the advisory board also serve on a presidential Intelligence Oversight Board, which was created in the 1970s after a congressional investigation into abuses by national security agencies and which tries to ferret out illegal spying activities. That group typically includes the larger board’s chair, so it is likely that Nunes will participate in it as well.

The work products of the two boards are usually kept secret. A rare exception came in 2023, when the Biden administration publicly released a report in which the two panels urged Congress to extend an expiring law that authorizes a warrantless surveillance program, but also called for new limits on the FBI’s ability to use information gathered under the program.

Nunes Was a Mainstream Member of the House GOP Caucus

Before Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, Nunes was seen as a fairly mainstream member of the House GOP caucus. And the House Intelligence Committee was generally seen as more serious and bipartisan than much of Congress.

But all of that changed starting in 2017, when Trump became president amid the FBI investigation into Russia’s covert attempt to manipulate the 2016 election and the nature of the ties between his campaign and Moscow. Trump sought to portray himself as a victim of a “deep state” plot. Nunes used his position to help him, and soon earned a reputation as a staunch Trump loyalist.

One of Trump’s early moves was to proclaim, baselessly, that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. No evidence ever surfaced to support that claim, but Nunes gave Trump an assist.

In March 2017, a few weeks after Trump’s claim, Nunes called a news conference at which he announced that a whistleblower had shown him materials revealing that the president or his associates might have been incidentally monitored, during the transition, in foreign-targeted surveillance by U.S. spy agencies. He said he intended to inform the White House about it.

But it later emerged that it was the Trump White House that had shown Nunes those materials — making Nunes’ misleading performance the butt of jokes.

Nunes also contended that Obama administration officials had improperly “unmasked” the identities of Trump’s associates in intelligence reports based on surveillance. Such reports normally do not name any Americans whom foreign targets are talking to or about, but officials can ask for an American’s identity if it would help them better understand a report.

Trump and other allies picked up on that theme and sought to make it into a scandal. But a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who was assigned to review the matter, John Bash, later concluded that there was nothing irregular, let alone illegal, in the unmasking requests.

Later, Nunes also played a significant role in defending Trump during the inquiry over his withholding of military assistance to Ukraine in a bid to pressure its government to say that Joe Biden, Trump’s likely 2020 rival, was under investigation for corruption. That inquiry led to Trump’s first impeachment.

The inquiry unfolded in the Intelligence Committee, which by then was under the control of Democrats, with Rep. Adam Schiff of California as chair. Nunes organized Republicans into a united front in downplaying what Trump had done and opposing the impeachment effort.

Along the way and since, Nunes has repeatedly sued news media organizations and his critics for purported defamation, even going after Twitter, now known as X, in a bid to identify the people behind parody accounts for his mother and his cow. (Nunes comes from a family of dairy farmers.) His numerous such lawsuits have so far not been successful.

Nunes also stuck close to Trump after his term ended. In late 2021, Nunes announced that he would be leaving Congress after 19 years to become the CEO of Trump’s new social media company.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Charlie Savage/Haiyun Jiang
c. 2024 The New York Times Company