ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

In Late August 2016, Donald Trump paid a visit to Tulare, Calif., a small city in the agricultural Central Valley and an unlikely stop for a Republican presidential campaign. California is a solidly blue state, and although Trump was in Tulare to speak at a fund-raiser, the $2,700 that most guests ponied up to attend hardly seemed substantial enough to justify the presence of a busy candidate. (At a fund-raiser Trump attended in Silicon Valley the day before, guests paid $25,000 a head.) At least one senior Trump campaign official argued against the trip, deeming it a colossal waste of time.

But Trump had one very good reason for visiting Tulare: It is the hometown of Representative Devin Nunes. While many Republican elected officials had maintained a wary distance from their party's presidential nominee, Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was one of the few, not to mention one of the most prominent, to offer Trump his unequivocal support -- which included holding the fund-raiser. Better still, Trump liked Nunes. Although the 44-year-old congressman seems to wear a permanent grimace in public, as if trying to lend his boyish face some gravitas, in private he is a bit of a bon vivant. "He's a pretty easy guy to like," says Johnny Amaral, Nunes's longtime political consigliere and friend. "And he's fiercely loyal. I think Trump recognized that."

The day before the Tulare event, Nunes drove up to the Bay Area to meet Trump and brief him on his district. Nunes expected to drive back to Tulare that evening, but Trump invited Nunes to fly with him to Los Angeles instead and then on to Tulare the next morning. It is unclear just what they discussed over those 24 hours, but by all accounts they seem to have strengthened their bond, and Nunes soon entered Trump's inner circle -- cementing a political alliance that would become one of the most consequential of the Trump era.

In the beginning, it was Nunes who influenced Trump. During the campaign, he tutored the candidate on water policy -- a crucial issue to California agribusiness interests -- and Trump heeded his warnings about the perfidy of environmentalists and government bureaucrats who were creating a "man-made drought." At the Tulare fund-raiser, Trump promised the crowd that he would get their water back for them. Once Trump was elected, he appointed Nunes to the executive committee of his transition team, where Nunes helped shape the nascent Trump administration's foreign policy. "He just took a very proactive role," one Trump transition official recalls. "He was very aggressive and assertive about things and people we had to have." According to the Trump transition official, Nunes was among the strongest advocates for Mike Pompeo, a colleague of his on the Intelligence Committee, to become the C.I.A. director and for James Mattis to become the secretary of defense. He also recommended a number of staff members, including his Intelligence Committee aide Derek Harvey, for positions on the National Security Council. "If we didn't have Nunes," the transition official says, "we wouldn't have had anything stood up. He took the lead and was very important."

The Trump team was so impressed with Nunes that, according to the transition official, it considered bringing him into the administration. A few weeks after the election, the congressman traveled to Trump Tower, where, according to transition officials, he and Trump discussed the possibility of his becoming the director of national intelligence and overseeing an ambitious reorganization of the intelligence community. But Trump ultimately decided to shelve those plans and appoint as director a less disruptive figure, Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator. Besides, with Pompeo leaving Capitol Hill for Langley, Trump's circle believed that Nunes would be even more valuable to the administration if he remained in Congress, running the Intelligence Committee.

'Devin and I had a very good relationship until March 21,' Adam Schiff said. 'From that point on, I think that he considered it his primary mission to protect the White House no matter the cost.'

Some 17 months later, that looks to have been a remarkably prescient decision -- as Trump appears to have been able to influence Nunes to a remarkable degree. So much so that during Trump's time in the White House, Nunes has transformed the Intelligence Committee into a beachhead from which to rally his fellow Republicans in support of the president against his perceived enemies -- not just the Democratic Party but also the F.B.I., the Department of Justice and the entire intelligence community. [...]

While many Republicans on Capitol Hill may nurse private reservations about Trump but choose not to voice them or stand in his way out of political calculation and fear, Nunes is a true believer. Years before the Russia investigation, he was extremely skeptical of -- if not paranoid about -- the American military and intelligence establishments in a way that presaged Trump's denunciations of the "deep state." Now he and Trump are waging war against these foes, real and imagined, together.

Devin Nunes began his political career, appropriately enough, because he believed he had uncovered a sinister plot.

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