The campaign committee for House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes has been funding a website billed as a local news outlet.
The site, CARepublican.com, features headlines ranging from national politics stories to state and local matters and college football. Many of the posts link out to conservative sites like National Review and The Federalist, and the Facebook page for the site labels it a media/news company that is focused on “delivering the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis.”
The site says it is paid for by Nunes’ campaign committee, and the congressman has shared some CARepublican posts on his Facebook page.
Nunes, like President Donald Trump, regularly asserts that news coverage critical of him is fake. His campaign’s foray into the news and information space would follow similar efforts by members of both parties, from the Trump campaign’s show on Facebook Live in the final stretch of the campaign to podcasts Sens. Bernie Sanders’ and Cory Booker’s own podcasts.
Politico detailed the existence of the site this weekend, and when asked about the website on Saturday, Nunes chief of staff Anthony Ratekin said, “Until Politico retracts its multitude of fake stories on Congressman Nunes, we will not go on the record.”
Following the Politico report, the website was throwing up error messages, although an archive of it was available.
Nunes has attracted significant scrutiny for his role in the Trump transition team and support for the White House as his committee investigates alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. He announced he would recuse himself from that investigation last year, and his work on the committee culminated recently in a dispute over a GOP memo he spearheaded alleging FBI surveillance abuses.
