In a recent Blasting News report, it was noted that subpoenas had been issued by the House Intelligence Committee to various members of the Trump White House over possible collusion with Russian officials and their interference with the 2016 presidential election. The focus on the Blasting News article, however, was on the fact that three of the subpoenas issued were to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to find out if there was any political motivation behind the "unmasking" of names of people in the Trump transition team.

Temporarily stepping away is not the same as recusal

In reports about the subpoenas, House Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was mentioned as the one who issued those subpoenas (reported to be four) despite reports that he had "recused" himself from the committee's investigation in April. In fact, as Blasting News reported then; Nunes had never officially recused himself from the investigation and had only made a statement at the time that he was going to step away from it temporarily. At the time of his statement, House Speaker Paul Ryan expressed his disappointment that Nunes was stepping away and at the same time, expressed his support for Nunes to continue the investigation. It is in this case that the media might have incorrectly seen this as a recusal and therefore reported it as such.

A 'hot mess' of scandals

Blasting News also reported on a similar issue with the Department of Justice (DOJ) when Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially recused himself from any incoming investigation, only to be very much involved in interviewing and hiring replacements for recently fired FBI Director James Comey. Comey was fired by President Trump for leading the investigation on him, which was confirmed by the President himself who said as much during an interview with NBC News.

The actions to subpoena the intelligence community appears to be part of an underlying pattern to further support the evolving argument that the Trump administration was "illegally" targeted by the Obama administration for political reasons.

It's also in this case that Nunes continues to make an effort to do the same thing that made Democrats originally demand that he recuse himself when he obtained "intelligence" documents from the White House without the committee's knowledge.

Those documents attempted to provide cover for the Trump administration's view that the Obama White House intentionally targeted the Trump transition team.

As mentioned in some of the Blasting News articles linked above, those documents were an attempt to give relavance to President Trump's outrageous and unproven claim that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower phones. It's been reported that Nunes himself had made unmasking requests to the same agencies he subpoenaed since June of last year on the Trump team, which he is now defending. Democrats have demanded again that Nunes recuse himself and Nunes himself has claimed that the Democrats don't want an investigation on Trump's connections to Russia.