House intel chairman Devin Nunes' "midnight run" to the White House last year set off a chain of events that has irreparably harmed the committee's ability to fulfill its charter - oversee the intelligence community, The New York Times reports.
However, Nunes' efforts to protect President Donald Trump above all else have made him a folk hero within the conspiratorial wing of the Republican party and cemented his status as one of the president's most trusted allies on the Hill, the Times reports.
The cost of that choice: dividing and making "toxic" a plush committee that had its origins in non-partisanship. Nunes has destroyed that, officials tell the Times.
“A lot of your effectiveness in overseeing the intelligence community is based on them wanting to have a good relationship with the overseers," a former intelligence committee staffer told the Times. "That’s all blown up. They’re not going to do anything they don’t absolutely have to do. They’re going to marginalize the community.
"It’s totally toxic. It’s irreversible. I think the committee has been essentially rendered useless," the ex-staffer told the Times.
It was March 21, 2017, when Nunes made a late-night run to the White House after getting a call from staffers at the National Security Council who detailed that members of Trump's campaign team had been picked up on surveillance.
Nunes' subsequent charges set off a yarn that validated Trump's assertion that the prior administration had been spying on him and his team, a red herring that took attention away from the previous day's revelation - that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation into possible collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia.
However, Nunes' star is on the rise within the GOP, a rock star of sorts who now is fronting fundraising efforts on behalf of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
And, the California Republican, who's expected to win re-election easily in November despite the headwinds afflicting most Republican incumbents, is on track to become the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, the Times reports.