Iowa

So here’s the secret: The Nunes family dairy of political lore—the one where his brother and parents work—isn’t in California. It’s in Iowa. Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007. Devin’s uncle Gerald still owns a dairy back in Tulare, which is presumably where The Wall Street Journal’s reporter talked to Devin, and Devin is an investor in a Napa Valley winery, Alpha Omega, but his immediate family’s farm—as well as his family—is long gone.

There’s nothing particularly strange about a congressman’s family moving. But what is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade. As far as I could tell, until late August, neither Nunes nor the local California press that covers him had ever publicly mentioned that his family dairy is no longer in Tulare.

For example, in 2010 Nunes traveled to northwest Iowa to campaign for Steve King, the most anti-immigrant member of Congress, who now represents Nunes’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law in Sibley. It was an unusual place to find Devin Nunes, given that at the time he wasn’t known to be hostile to immigrants in the way that has made King, who has called illegal immigration a “slow-motion terrorist attack,” so infamous.

King’s office posted a press release online announcing that the town-hall event would be in Le Mars, a town fifty miles southwest of Sibley, and included some biographical information about Nunes, including this fact: “Congressman Nunes’ family has operated a dairy farm in Tulare County, California for three generations.” There was no mention that the Nunes family actually lived up the road in Sibley, where they operated a dairy. Strange.

In June 2009, an obscure dairy trade publication, Dairy Star, ran a profile of the Nunes family dairy in Sibley. The article documents how the Nunes family, “recent transplants to the Midwest,” emigrated from Portugal to California to Iowa and started NuStar Farms, which Anthony Jr. manages with his son and wife.

The article mentions numerous Nunes family members, including Uncle Gerald, who was still back in California, and baby Maci, “the first Nunes to be born outside of California or Portugal,” but there is one person missing from the article: Devin Nunes.