Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman from the San Joaquin valley, “once said all he wanted to do was work on a dairy farm,” says a profile by The Associated Press of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “He’s a long way from raising cattle.”
The AP says Nunes, 43, whose district includes parts of Fresno and Tulare counties, “is at the helm of a probe of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 campaign and the murky web of contacts between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.”
Nunes won election to the House in 2002 at age 28. In the GOP primary, he appealed to the concerns of ranchers and dairy farmers in a conservative district. He served one term on the House Agriculture Committee before starting his way up the congressional ladder. “Nunes consistently has supported bills that would roll back environmental protections and boost federal water supplies to the fertile farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley, the lower stretch of California’s vast Central Valley,” said AP.