Republican Nunes Claims Democrats Seek Donald Trump Nude Photos

As House Democrats ramped up their impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, things got weird at a nationally televised House Intelligennce Committee hearing when the committee’s top Republican made a bizarre accusation against the Democrats. The accusation came from California GOP rep Devin Nunes, a hardcore Trump ally, as the committee prepared to hear testimony from Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. The hearing opened two hours after the Intelligence Committee revealed a previously classified whistleblower complaint detailing Trump’s effort to strong-arm the president of Ukraine to dig up phony dirt on Trump’s potential 2020 Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. But in his opening remarks, Nunes—the top-ranking Republican on the intelligence committee—went off on an unhinged rant, first accusing Democrats of waging “information warfare” against Trump, then accusing them of “ginning up a fake story with no regard to the monumental damage they’re causing to our public institutions and our trust in government.”  But then Nunes got to the good part. “Democrats on this very committee negotiated with people who they thought were Ukrainians in order to obtain nude pictures of Trump," Nunes charged. What “nude pictures of Trump” was Nunes talking about—and why would Democrats care about such things? Nunes appeared to be referring to a 2018 incident in which two Russian-government-connected pranksters named Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarovm called House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, claiming to be a high-ranking member of Ukraine’s Rada, the country’s legislature. In that call, the pranksters claimed to be offering “kompromat,” that is, compromising material on Trump—including “pictures of naked Trump,” according to an Atlantic magazine report. Schiff played along with the prank, but later said that before taking the call, his office “informed appropriate law-enforcement and security personnel of the conversation, and of our belief that it was probably bogus.” Nonetheless, Nunes apparently couldn’t resist a reference to the prank—without mentioning that it was, in fact, a prank, using it to supposedly embarrass and discredit Democrats—the exact purpose intended by the Russian pranksters, who have “cozy ties to the Russian government,” according to the Atlantic. Photo By Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons