California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes (previously)
has been one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, who has used his office
as Head of the House Intelligence Committee to promote the evidence-free conspiracy theory that Obama’s FBI spied on the Trump campaign.
Historically, Nunes has set himself apart from his fellow Republicans:
willing to compromise on immigration reform, and hailing from the
predominantly Democratic state of California.
Nunes’s Californian roots have been key to his electoral success; his
campaign literature, press interviews and public appearances make great
hay out of his family’s dairy farm in California.
What Nunes’s materials don’t mention is that his family
secretly relocated the family farm to Iowa in 2006, to the town of
Sibley (a town best known for having unsuccessfully sued a resident for putting up a website complaining about the “rotten blood and stale beer odors” produced by a dog-food factory).
Esquire’s Ryan Lizza went to Sibley to investigate the Nunes family’s
move and its shroud of secrecy and found himself mired in an American
gothic small-town mystery, shadowed everywhere he went by Nunes family
members in SUVs (he put Gopros in his car and used them to record his
watchers, who creepily circled every spot he parked; he was later able
to identify them on Facebook).
Lizza spoke to multiple sources who described the town and its dairy
industry’s dependence on undocumented labor (including multiple sources
who claimed direct knowledge of undocumented workers employed on the
Nunes family farm), and the town’s growing disenchantment with Donald
Trump and their Congressman, Steve King (previously) a white supremacist xenophobe
who is the Republican’s strongest anti-immigration advocate (Sibley is
in Osceola County, and was the county’s strongest Trump-voting district,
going 79% for Trump) (Nunes’s father has only ever donated to two
federal candidates: his son, and Steve King).
As Lizza chased down the story, his sources showed signs of
intimidation. The Nunes family reportedly called a local newspaper and
demanded that it remove a nine-year-old article that celebrated the
Nunes family’s move to Iowa.
