Jennifer Rubin: Nunes tape proof ‘irredeemable’ GOP needs to be defeated

Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post columnist, said taped audio of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) suggesting that a Republican majority is needed to protect President Trump is proof that the GOP should be defeated. 

Rubin slammed Nunes and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) during an appearance on MSNBC late Wednesday, calling them “irredeemable.” 

“If there is ever a better reason to get rid of Paul Ryan’s party, it’s this,” Rubin said of the Nunes audio tape. “They exercise no responsibility, it’s always about the party, it’s always about protecting the president and never about doing their constitutional obligation.”

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“So my takeaway from this [is] … these people really are irredeemable, and if you want a constitutional check on the president of the United States, you’re doing to have to change parties,” she added.

Rubin said the secret tape, released on Wednesday, is just another political embarrassment for Ryan, adding that the Speaker has left “unserious” and “irresponsible” Nunes as head of the House Intelligence Committee.

Nunes, speaking at a private fundraiser for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) last week, said that “if [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions won’t unrecuse and [special counsel Robert] Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones.”

Nunes, a top ally of the president, recused himself from his committee’s investigation into Russian election interference last year after he made a private trip to the White House to see documents he described as showing that members of Trump’s White House transition team had their identities unmasked in intelligence reports.

“And now we have Kathy McMorris Rodgers, who is the No. 4 person  — doing very badly, by the way, in her primary — sitting there like a lump in the log as this person waxing about how his primary job is to protect the president and not to do his job,” Rubin said on MSNBC.

“These people look like stooges,” Rubin added.

Rubin frequently criticizes the GOP and Trump in her “Right Turn” blog for the Post, previously calling Trump an “arrogant fool” and a “flat-out racist.”

Last week, she declared in an editorial that the GOP “isn’t fit to govern.”

She also said that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders should be “shunned” from her next job for her false and misleading claims.