A former GOP lawmaker who gave up a safe House seat to work for President Donald Trump — only to be fired — is now running a wine bar, according to reports.

In a tongue-in-cheek column for the San Francisco Gate, journalist Anabel Sosa reminded readers that ex-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was once known as the president's "stooge" during his time in Congress.

Jon Fleishman, formerly of the California Republican Party, openly joked about the career shift.

"I don't know what's better preparation for opening a wine bar, serving in Congress or being a part of the Trump organization," Fleishman said. "Either of them would wanna make me drink a lot of wine."

Nunes is now serving wine in a beachfront community once known as the "Clam Capital of the World" — a steep drop from his tenure as CEO of Truth Social, where he made $47 million in 2024, a sum driven largely by stock awards rather than salary.

He made headlines during the first Trump administration as a Central Valley representative accused of meddling in Trump's Russia investigation in order to protect the president. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes set off those accusations with a secretive 2017 nighttime trip to the White House grounds to review classified reports, which he then briefed to the president before informing his own committee members. He also sued a parody Twitter account called "Devin Nunes' Cow" for $250 million after it called him a "treasonous cowpoke" — a case that was later dismissed after vaulting the parody account to national attention.

Nunes left Congress to run Trump's social media platform and has since re-emerged as a wine investor and the owner of a new tasting room in Pismo Beach called the Nunes Wine Company. The shift is less random than it might appear: before nine terms in Washington, Nunes grew up on his family's dairy farm in Tulare County, in the agricultural heart of the Central Valley district he went on to represent.

During his time in Congress, Nunes was one of Trump's biggest defenders amid the investigation into whether Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election, releasing the 2018 memo that bore his name and alleged FBI abuses in its surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser. He faced blowback after he was accused of colluding with the White House, but was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing by an ethics committee, Sosa wrote.

In 2021, Nunes resigned from Congress to become CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, which launched in February 2022. Trump, for his part, awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation's highest civilian honor — in the closing days of his first term. Under Nunes, the company went public on the Nasdaq in March 2024 under the ticker DJT, roughly two and a half years after its SPAC merger was first announced. He left that position in April of this year.

Source: Raw Story