There Might Be Life in the Live-Action Akira Remake Just Yet

Zack Snyder discusses the importance of Superman in Justice League. Jessica Chastain throws her hat in the ring for Gotham City Sirens. Michael Keaton compares his Spider-Man: Homecoming villain to Tony Stark. Plus, new details about the Tomb Raider reboot, and a ton of new pictures from American Gods. To me, my…

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How I Let Disney Track My Every Move

On a recent trip to Disney World, I had an unusual experience. I rode a ride. It broke. We were evacuated, and a few minutes later, I got a picture on my phone. It was an empty raft sliding down Splash Mountain, taken at precisely the moment I was walking down the emergency stairwell. It was weird.

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This Is One NERF Dart You Wouldn’t Want to Be Hit by

The thing about NERF darts is, they’re designed to be safe. You can unload them on friends without having to worry about any serious injury, but what happens when you fire a NERF dart from an air cannon? Let’s just say you will want to get the hell out of the way!

On the latest episode of his NERF Experiments series, Giaco Whatever loaded up an air cannon he built with NERF darts, and let them rip. They’re so fast, you can’t see them with your naked eye, so he captured slow motion footage to find out just how fast the NERF darts were traveling from the cannon.

It turns out that the dart flies along at about Mach 2.3, which is 2.3 times the speed of sound. And that means that the dart is wayyy more dangerous than when it’s fired from an ordinary NERF gun.

Yes, it took a nice chunk out of that block of wood. Clearly you don’t want to be in the path of this thing. If you don’t believe me, check this out:

[via Laughing Squid]

A Couple Of Things About Jimmy Breslin

Last Wednesday, I sat down to write a piece about the late Jimmy Breslin, the newspaper columnist whose blunt yet eloquent and crafted prose captured New York and its environs as no one has since Damon Runyon.

Jimmy died a little more than a week ago and I wanted to say a few words to note ― as so many others have — how he was an inspiration to anyone who on a regular basis has to put some thoughts together in a column for publication, often straining until tiny beads of blood pop out on their foreheads.

But there were distractions. As I started to write, news came from London of the lone wolf terrorist who barreled his SUV into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, then dashed to Parliament and stabbed to death a policeman. Five died, including the attacker, and more than 50 were injured.

Then there was California Republican Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, dashing to the White House to give to Donald Trump new info he’d received, allegedly on the surveillance of Trump associates who may have been colluding with Russia to mess with the election. None of this was shared with his fellow committee members.

I think I know what Breslin would have thought of the toadying Nunes and I know for sure what Breslin thought about Trump, because he wrote about him on at least three occasions.

The last was on June 7, 1990. Breslin was describing how easily Trump played the press for suckers, simply by returning their phone calls and bragging his way onto the front page. He was able to con financial types, too, getting them to sink more money into his grandiose real estate ventures.

Breslin wrote, “All Trump has to do is stick to the rules on which he was raised by his father in the County of Queens:

Never use your own money. Steal a good idea and say it’s your own. Do anything to get publicity. Remember that everybody can be bought.

As you can see, more than 25 years ago, he had Trump down cold. In fact, another great journalist, Pete Hamill, told the New York Daily News that Breslin saw Trump as the kind of guy who’s “all mouth and couldn’t fight his way out of an empty lot.”

In another piece, Breslin described Trump as toastmaster at a celebration of greed. This was a column about the full-page ad Trump took out in the New York newspapers in 1989, demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, teenagers wrongly accused of the rape and attack of a woman jogger.

That last piece of his suggests to me that had Breslin lived to give us a column last Wednesday he would not have been as distracted as I was. He would not have been writing about the London attack or weaselly congressman Nunes. Instead, he would have tracked down the family and friends of Timothy Caughman, the 66-year-old African-African man who was stabbed to death on a Manhattan street late last Monday night, allegedly by a sword-wielding, self-proclaimed white supremacist named James Harris Jackson.

Reports indicate that Jackson intended his hate crime against Caughman as a test run for a mass murder of black men in Times Square. He’s from Maryland but thought he’d get more attention by doing his worst in the media capital of the world. He turned himself in before committing more mayhem.

Some described his victim Caughman as a man rummaging though the trash for bottles and cans. But Breslin would have gone deeper, learned from acquaintances that Caughman had attended college, worked with young people, collected autographs and took selfies with celebrities; that he was cherished by the people who knew him.

It’s possible Breslin would have cited New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, son of Breslin’s friend Mario, who said, “We must continue to deny that the ideas behind this cowardly crime have any place in democratic society.” And he probably would have pointed out that while President Trump was quick to condemn the deaths in London at the hands of a British-born Muslim, he has yet to issue a peep or a tweet about the death of Timothy Caughman at the hands of a homegrown American racist.

It would have made Breslin really mad. “Rage is the only quality,” he said, “which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

******

I was very young when I first became aware of Jimmy Breslin. It was in the days just after the death of President John F. Kennedy. One of the local newspapers in my area picked up the columns Breslin was writing about the assassination for the New York Herald Tribune.

There was the now-famous piece about Clifton Pollard, the $3.01-an-hour gravedigger who used a backhoe to dig Kennedy’s grave at Arlington Cemetery. That Pollard story was mentioned in almost every Breslin obit, but the column I especially remember was “A Death in Emergency Room One.” Much of it was about Dr. Malcolm Perry, the Dallas surgeon summoned to do what he could:

The president, Perry thought. He’s much bigger than I thought he was.

He noticed the tall, dark-haired girl in the plum dress that had her husband’s blood all over the front of the skirt. She was standing out of the way, over against the gray tile wall. Her face was tearless and it was set, and it was to stay that way because Jacqueline Kennedy, with a terrible discipline, was not going to take her eyes from her husband’s face.

Then Malcolm Perry stepped up to the aluminum hospital cart and took charge of the hopeless job of trying to keep the 35th president of the United States from death.

I read a paperback collection of Breslin’s Herald Tribune columns and then his first book, Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? — an account of the New York Mets’ disastrous first season. They lost 120 games, still a major league baseball record. The title was a quote from Mets manager Casey Stengel, who also said, “Been in this game 100 years, but I see new ways to lose ‘em I never knew existed before.”

And yet New Yorkers loved the hapless Mets. Breslin wrote:

This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurance Rockefeller?

I wanted to write like Breslin, cracking tough and wise, just as I wanted to write like Pete Hamill and Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Molly Ivins and Chicago’s Mike Royko. After I moved to Manhattan, our paths crossed from time to time. Once I shot a television segment with Jimmy in the old Daily News city room. He talked about Sinclair Lewis’ novel Babbitt and how its portrayal of conformity and jingoism made it a perfect book for the Reagan years. On top of everything else, he was a very well-read fellow.

But our oddest encounter was in 1976, when I briefly held a job as Jimmy Breslin’s bodyguard. I am not making this up.

He was receiving an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and delivering the commencement address. A friend of mine who worked there called and asked me to accompany Breslin on the short plane ride to Worcester. In those days, Jimmy had a reputation for two-fisted drinking and I was charged by my friend with the task of getting Breslin to graduation sober.

It turned out to be just about the easiest job I ever had. Jimmy and I met up at LaGuardia Airport and the first words out of his mouth were, “I’ve got the worst effing hangover in my life.” The thought of a drink repulsed him.

So we safely arrived in Worcester. But the friend who had hired me thought it would be a swell idea to take Breslin to a working-class bar and have him interact with the locals. And not only that, my somewhat obtuse friend had invited the NBC affiliate to come shoot the proceedings for the 11 o’clock news.

This joint was hardcore, with picnic tables and folding chairs inside and sawdust on the wooden floor, a hangout for serious blue-collar imbibers. They valued their alcohol but even more their privacy because the second those bright TV lights went on in that dark saloon, patrons scattered, howling profane variations on, “What if my boss/wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend, etc., sees me!?”

Jimmy handled the difficult situation with aplomb and that night in his hotel room, hangover be damned, wrote a hell of a commencement speech. Two of the other degree recipients were Mother Teresa and federal judge Arthur Garrity, who two years before had ordered mandatory busing to desegregate Boston’s public schools. There was violence and Garrity received death threats. The college was honoring the jurist’s brave and difficult decision and in his speech, Breslin did, too:

As we are here this morning, men in power meet in Washington to discuss ways of getting around Arthur Garrity’s decisions. Is there, these men ask, some way to use polite meaningless words as a method of avoiding moral obligations? To Arthur Garrity the answer is clear. The answer is no.

Ceremony over and hangover forgotten, Breslin headed for the hotel bar, the rest of us in tow. At the graduation, he had run into a pal from his old neighborhood, a military officer of high rank, and by the end of that boozy afternoon, the two were on the phone long distance to Queens, shouting to a character who frequently popped up in Breslin’s columns, Fat Thomas the bookie.

It was quite a day. Somewhere I still have a copy of the Worcester newspaper from that afternoon with Breslin’s commencement speech featured as the lead story. Jimmy autographed the front page.

He stopped drinking a decade or so later — “Whiskey betrays you when you need it most,” he said — but kept pouring out the prose, brilliant and rude and irascible, looking out for the underdog, calling out the bad guys; always to the point and a perpetual pain in the neck, usually for the right reasons.

Of his vast range of experience, good and bad, Jimmy Breslin said, “I was about 67 people in my life.” Lucky for the rest of us, all of them could write.

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Trump Voters Don’t Blame Him For The Health Care Bill’s Failure

Most of the public isn’t shedding many tears over AHCA. President Trump’s approval ratings may be headed even further underwater. And more Americans than ever are worrying about climate change. This is HuffPollster for Tuesday, March 28, 2017.

FEW ARE MOURNING THE DEMISE OF THE GOP’S HEALTH BILL – HuffPollster: “After Republicans’ attempt to repeal Obamacare failed, a narrow plurality of Americans wants to see the party move on to other issues, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov survey. The American Health Care Act, which was deeply unpopular during its brief lifespan, is no more popular in its demise. Just 21 percent say they supported it, with a majority, 52 percent, saying they were opposed. The 6 percent who say they strongly favored the bill are outnumbered nearly 6 to 1 by those who strongly opposed it. Americans say by a 7-percentage-point margin, 44 percent to 37 percent, that Republicans should move on to other issues rather than proposing another health care bill…Trump voters were only lukewarmly positive about AHCA ― 45 percent say that they supported it and 31 percent that they opposed it.   But they generally don’t see its failure as a death knell for Republicans’ prospects of fulfilling their promise to repeal Obamacare.” [HuffPost]

Who gets the blame? – More from the survey: “Asked who’s most responsible for the bill’s failure, 27 percent of Americans put the bulk of the blame on its authors, with 17 percent naming the congressional Republicans who opposed the bill, another 17 percent naming Trump and 14 percent citing congressional Democrats. Just 4 percent of Trump voters, however, believe that Trump is most responsible for the bill’s failure, and only 11 percent assign him even partial responsibility. Instead, they cast the blame nearly everywhere else.”

TRUMP’S ALREADY LOW RATINGS MAY BE GETTING EVEN LOWER  – HuffPollster: “In a Gallup survey released Monday, just 36 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s job as president. It was a new low for him, and 2 percentage points below former President Barack Obama’s all-time worst numbers, according to Gallup’s polling. That specific number, like any individual data point, doesn’t actually mean all that much. Gallup’s tracking poll is somewhat volatile, as is the public reaction to its findings. When Trump’s approval hit a previous low of 37 percent earlier this month, it kicked off a wave of social media freakouts. Then, it promptly rebounded by several points….But even in the aggregate, Trump’s current approval rating doesn’t look too good. HuffPost Pollster’s average, which combines publicly available polling, puts Trump’s approval rating somewhat higher: It’s about 40 percent as of Monday afternoon, with just under 56 percent disapproving….The aggregate also suggests that Trump’s numbers, on average, are worsening after a period of relative stability. Individual trend lines tell a similar story. Most pollsters who’ve conducted at least two surveys this month, and at least one with field dates as recent as last week, show the president’s net approval declining during the course of March.” [HuffPost]

Some historical context from Gallup – Frank Newport: “Trump’s current 36% is two percentage points below Barack Obama’s low point of 38%, recorded in 2011 and 2014. Trump has also edged below Bill Clinton’s all-time low of 37%, recorded in the summer of 1993, his first year in office, as well as Gerald Ford’s 37% low point in January and March 1975. John F. Kennedy’s lowest approval rating was 56%; Dwight Eisenhower’s was 48%….Presidential job approval ratings are fluid, and all presidents have seen both upward and downward swings in their ratings at various points in their administrations ― a historical precedent indicating Trump’s approval could drop further or recover in the weeks and months ahead. An encouraging sign for Trump, perhaps, is that all presidents whose ratings fell below 36% ― with the exception of Nixon ― saw their ratings improve thereafter.” [Gallup]

A RECORD SHARE OF AMERICANS ARE ‘CONCERNED BELIEVERS’ ON GLOBAL WARMING – Lydia Saad: “With a record number of Americans sounding the alarm on global warming, the share of the U.S. population that Gallup categorizes as ‘Concerned Believers’ on climate change has consequently reached a new high of 50%. This is up slightly from 47% in 2016 but is well above the 37% recorded only two years ago….Concerned Believers worry a great deal about global warming and think human activity causes global warming. Two-thirds in this group also expect global warming to pose a serious threat in their lifetime, while none believe that news reports exaggerate the problem….There has long been a disconnect between the high proportions of Americans who believe global warming is real and even ascribe it to human activity, and the low priority Americans give to global warming as a policy issue and a factor in their vote. This is largely explained by the relatively low percentages of Americans who consider global warming a serious threat in their lifetimes or who say they worry a great deal about it. That may be changing, however.” [Gallup]

SUPPORT FOR SOME LIBERAL POSITIONS MAY BE SOLIDIFYING – Aaron Blake: “For the first time ever, half of Americans say they believe in climate change and that they are very concerned about it, according to Gallup. Thanks, President Trump. Climate change is merely the latest issue on which the American people have moved appreciably and significantly to the left in the Trump era. While it’s difficult to ascribe any one of these shifts to Trump specifically, the pattern is becoming clearer. And there’s growing evidence that Trump is unifying half (or more) of the country against things he has vocally supported — in ways they simply weren’t unified before….A more long-running example of this is Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall. While it had been a somewhat popular proposal for years, Americans have now turned against it pretty strongly….A big reason for the decline, UC-Irvine professor Michael Tesler noted, was that Trump opponents rallied to the view he opposed.” [WashPost]

DID POOR DEMOCRATIC TURNOUT REALLY SINK HILLARY CLINTON? – Nate Cohn: “In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, many analysts suggested that Hillary Clinton lost to Donald J. Trump because of poor Democratic turnout. Months later, it is clear that the turnout was only modestly better for Mr. Trump than expected. To the extent Democratic turnout was weak, it was mainly among black voters. Even there, the scale of Democratic weakness has been exaggerated. Instead, it’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump. Over all, almost one in four of President Obama’s 2012 white working-class supporters defected from the Democrats in 2016, either supporting Mr. Trump or voting for a third-party candidate. This analysis compares official voter files — data not available until months after the election — with The Upshot’s pre-election turnout projections in Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina….These estimates suggest that turnout improved Mr. Trump’s standing by a modest margin compared with pre-election expectations. If the turnout had gone exactly as we thought it would, the election would have been extremely close. But by this measure, Mrs. Clinton still would have lost both Florida and Pennsylvania — albeit very narrowly….It’s important to note that this is just one analysis, based on one set of data.” [NYT]

HUFFPOLLSTER VIA EMAIL! – You can receive this daily update every weekday morning via email! Just click here, enter your email address, and click “sign up.” That’s all there is to it (and you can unsubscribe anytime).

TUESDAY’S ‘OUTLIERS’ – Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:

-Most Americans say an FBI investigation of Trump-Russia ties is necessary. [HuffPost]

-Harry Enten and Julia Azari highlight the fractures in the GOP exposed by last week’s health care debate. [538]

-Philip Bump finds Donald Trump losing support among independents. [WashPost]

-Juliana Menasce Horowitz breaks down Americans’ views on paternity leave. [Pew]

-Steven Shepard chronicles Democrats’ post-election assessment of their campaign polling. [Politico]

-Josh Voorhees raises questions about Kellyanne Conway’s ties to her former polling firm. [Slate]

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Wildly Talented Nigerian Artist Made This Drawing Without Any Training Whatsoever

Nigerian artist Arinze Stanley has been drawing for as long as he can remember.

Remarkably, however, he has never had any training, an especially admirable fact given the meticulous detail and technical mastery of his hyperrealist portraits. “I’ve managed by the grace of God to discipline myself in the art of drawing,” Stanley wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. 

When it comes to his art practice, anything can serve as inspiration, so long as it evokes a certain emotional response. As Stanley put it: “I draw inspiration from life experiences and basically everything that sparks a feeling of necessity, I love to express deep and strong emotions, as I find them most attractive.”

Mostly, Stanley draws close-up portraits of human faces, which end up looking more true to life than any black-and-white photograph could. Every pore, every nostril hair, every bead of sweat and eyelid wrinkle is dutifully translated to the page, producing images that seem to capture more detail than our very own eyes. 

For his drawings, Stanley uses both charcoal and graphite pencils, experimenting with techniques that include cross-hatching and scribbling to yield images as lifelike as possible. “Basically, it just flows through me into the paper,” he described.

When Stanley recounts his artistic process, he sounds almost as if he enters a trance-like state. “Sometimes it’s almost like I’m not in control of my pencil,” he said, “sort of like energy transfer. Most times I feel like I transfer my energy into a blank piece of paper through my pencils and it just becomes art.”

The moral of the story is that you don’t need to go to art school to create images so detailed they put reality to shame. You just need a sharp supply of pencils and well, a lot of talent and patience. 

Watch Stanley’s process in the images below, and head to his Instagram for more. 

Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, Tracy Morgan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Moore, Padma Lakshmi and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Donate now and join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31 on Facebook Live. #standforrights2017 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

This Cat Yoga Trend Serves A Much Bigger Purpose

For cat lovers and exercise enthusiasts, free yoga classes filled with feline friends sounds like a pretty good deal. But these classes are offered with a larger purpose in mind: The cats need homes.

The P.A.W.S. Animal Adoption Center in Bangor, Maine, offers free monthly cat yoga classes as a way to introduce potential new pet owners to some kitties in need. P.A.W.S. executive director Shelley Butler told the Bangor Daily News Monday that the classes were a “win-win” because yoga has therapeutic benefits cats bring joy to many people.

Butler got the idea for the monthly classes after reading about other animal shelters in the U.S. with similar offers. 

The trend started when yoga practitioner Jeanette Skaluba, a volunteer at the now-closed Homeward Bound Pet Shelter, in Decatur, Illinois, posted a video of her performing the practice with kitties to YouTube, according to Yoga Journal.

Skaluba started a website devoted to the concept called Yoga For Cats, though the trend has also been dubbed Meowga.

At New York City’s Meow Parlour, the Big Apple’s first cat cafe, Yoga and Kitty classes are offered five times a month in partnership with the nonprofit organization KittyKind. The parlour’s teacher Amy Apgar leads groups in 30 minutes of cat playtime and 45 minutes of yoga.

“These cats are all up for adoption. Some of them are special needs,” she told CNN. “Some of them have been through a lot.”

And there’s a happy ending for the cats in Bangor too. Since P.A.W.S. started offering the sessions in January, all of the cats that have participated have been adopted, the organization told Bangor Daily News. 

Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, Tracy Morgan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Moore, Padma Lakshmi and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Donate now and join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31 on Facebook Live. #standforrights2017 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Adorable 'Up'-Themed Promposal Will Send Your Spirits Sky High

Forget about the over-the-top promposal for 2017.

This teenager took it back to basics when asking a girl to a high school dance, and won the hearts of thousands of social media users in the process.

Keeping it wonderfully simple, he tied balloons to a keyboard ― just like the ones that whisked Carl Fredricksen’s house away in the 2009 movie “Up.” He followed that up by playing the film’s main theme when his date-to-be arrived outside his garage.

Luckily, she said yes, and video of the heartwarming moment went viral after Twitter user Tyler Chipwood posted it online.

The Huffington Post has reached out for further information on the video, which has moved many fellow tweeters to tears:

Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, Tracy Morgan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Moore, Padma Lakshmi and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Donate now and join us at 7 p.m. Eastern on Friday, March 31 on Facebook Live. #standforrights2017 

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Rooney Mara Headlines The Mesmerizing Trailer For Sundance Standout 'A Ghost Story'

The two best movies I saw at this year’s Sundance Film Festival were the gay coming-of-age romance “Call Me by Your Name” and the haunting spiritual poem “A Ghost Story.” See, it’s hard to talk about “A Ghost Story” without giving too much away. Haunting spiritual poem? What does that even mean? Just trust me.

Thankfully, A24 premiered the trailer on Tuesday, so you can see for yourself before the movie hits theaters July 7. The latest from “Pete’s Dragon” and “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” director David Lowery, “A Ghost Story” stars Rooney Mara as a Texan whose spectral husband (Casey Affleck) returns to their home after dying in a car crash. 

Yep, it’s a literal ghost story, but it’s hardly a horror movie. In fact, it’s bound to be one of the most original, captivating, hard-to-explain stories to grace the big screen this year, and not only because Mara binge-eats an entire pie in one sitting.

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Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, Tracy Morgan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Moore, Padma Lakshmi and a whole host of other stars are teaming up for Stand for Rights: A Benefit for the ACLU. Donate now and join us at 7 p.m. ET on Friday, March 31, on Facebook Live. #standforrights2017

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Devin Nunes Cancels House Intelligence Committee Meetings Amid Growing Questions

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WASHINGTON ― Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on Tuesday abruptly canceled all House Intelligence Committee meetings scheduled for this week, according to committee members, raising further questions on whether its investigation into ties between President Donald Trump’s administration and Russia can proceed.

“Not only [has] this investigation sort of had a shadow cast on it, but the committee has been put into suspended animation,” committee member Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said on MSNBC, confirming previous reports that Nunes, the committee chair, had canceled the meetings.

The move comes amid growing scrutiny over whether Nunes can lead an independent investigation into ties between Trump’s team and Russian officials.

Nunes claimed last week that members of the president’s team were subject to “incidental” surveillance. One day before making these allegations, however, he met with a source on White House grounds. Nunes said he needed a secure location to view sensitive information, but the visit raised further doubts about the transparency of the investigation and whether Nunes is coordinating with the White House.

After holding a press conference about his findings, Nunes also briefed Trump, whose team is under FBI investigation for alleged ties to Russian officials who may have interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

Himes said Tuesday that Nunes had not shared his information with the rest of the committee.

“No member of the committee, Republican or Democrat, has seen, after a full week, this stuff that caused Nunes to make himself famous nationally,” Himes said Tuesday. “Not a single member of the committee. I don’t even think anybody on his own staff has any idea what caused him to do this sort of musical chairs thing with the White House.”

Democrats have called for Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, to recuse himself from the investigation or even to be replaced as head of the committee, with some speculating that the chairman wants to protect Trump.

“Chairman Nunes is falling down on the job and seems to be more interested in protecting the president than in seeking the truth,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday.

Several Democratic members of the committee said Nunes had lost their trust.

“In the interest of a fair and impartial investigation, whose results will be respected by the public, the Chairman’s recusal is more than warranted,” the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said Monday.

I think that the writing is on the wall. It might make a good spy novel. It doesn’t make a good investigation.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.)

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), another member of the committee, said Nunes’ White House meeting was “the last straw.” She suggested he had “colluded in a desperate attempt to salvage the president’s credibility, after the president’s bogus wiretapping claims were debunked by his own FBI director.”

She told CNN on Tuesday that she believes “there is an effort under way to shut this committee down, by the president.”

“I don’t think he can just recuse himself and still chair the committee,” Speier said of Nunes. “I think that the writing is on the wall. It might make a good spy novel. It doesn’t make a good investigation.”

But Nunes said in interviews Monday night that he has no intention of stepping down.

“I’m sure the Democrats do want me to quit because they know that I’m quite effective at getting to the bottom of things,” he told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

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