With the Trump Russia collusion "narrative" rapidly falling apart, and questions about the perpetrators of the myth getting more obvious, what should we see here but a Deep State effort to strike out at the man who's trying to get to the bottom of the whole story and expose it: House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes?

Monday, the Washington Post ran a long exposé about how Nunes "alarms Democrats and some Republicans" over his Russia investigation, citing the most stupid, insubstantial, and jejeune of reasons.  Frankly, this looks like a Deep State hit job with just scraps and crumbs to work with.

Although Nunes has not officially wrested his panel's Russia probe back from the Republicans he deputized to run it, the chairman's reemergence as a combative Trump loyalist has raised alarm among Democrats that the future of the investigation may be clipped short or otherwise undermined.  Even some of Nunes's GOP allies have expressed concern about his tactics, prompting rare public warnings that he should temper his attacks on federal law enforcement.

Those "some of Nunes's GOP allies" don't seem to be doing anything of the sort, based on the interviews the Post has made, and you know they tried to cherry-pick the most damaging parts.  And actually, it's only one ally, Trey Gowdy, not multiple ones.

"I'm interested in getting access to the information and not the drama," Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said last month, when Nunes began threatening contempt citations for FBI [d]irector Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein in the wake of revelations that former Mueller team members had exchanged ­anti-Trump texts.

Kind of a vague statement from Gowdy in any case – how exactly is Nunes to get the information from an unwilling agency that Congress funds without warning the agency's members that they'll be in contempt if they don't comply?  Sweet talk?  Somehow, that doesn't sound like something Gowdy would say.  I suspect that something was either distorted in the interview or taken out of context.

Gowdy goes on to criticize Democrats for attempting to subpoena and interview, as Tom Wolfe vividly put it in The Right Stuff, "the dog, the cat, the rhododendrons."

It's not exactly alarm at Nunes.

The other criticisms of Nunes causing such alarm are that he sent staffers into Russian collusion meetings he recused himself from earlier and that he seemed to – horrors! – want to hold the FBI leadership accountable.

Big, big deal.  None of this stuff was either illegal or unethical.  What we are seeing here is a dogged congressman who is someone to be reckoned with, using his powers to do his job and get to the bottom of a complicated case of embittered Executive Branch agencies that refuse to accept the presidency of President Trump.  That is all.  Democratic intelligence committee chairmen had their heyday with the likes of the Church committee against the CIA in the 1970s and the Iran Contra investigations.  Now Nunes is doing the same job from his party's side, against corrupt officials who thumb their noses at subpoenas and plot on their cell phones to develop "insurance policies" against President Trump.  That howls for an investigation, and Nunes is doing it.

This WaPo report is nothing but a Deep State project to obstruct that effort and put the spotlight on those who are trying to overturn rocks and hose things out.