Twenty years ago this summer, University of Hawaii law professor Randall Roth, with co-authors Judge Samuel P. King, Msgr. Charles Kekumano, Walter Heen and Gladys Brandt, published a now famous example of investigative journalism in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin entitled “Broken Trust.”

In September of the following year, as a direct result of that publication, Hawaii State Attorney General Margery S. Bronster charged the leadership of the hugely rich and powerful Bishop Estate with financial mismanagement, excessive compensation and kickbacks, eventually bringing down several of the estate’s trustees and permanently altering the future of the Kamehameha Schools – at somewhere around $10 billion today, the most heavily endowed private school in America.

Now not only Hawaii, but the whole of the United States may be facing another “Broken Trust,” this time with the president of the United States. With the political party of the White House controlling both the House and the Senate as well, we only have investigative press to rely on for bringing the story to light.

The Daily Beast is a small fact-finding website. It is not a “newspaper of record,” not the first place you would naturally look for coverage of a “bombshell” news story. However, we should not under-estimate the power of investigative reporting by smaller independent journals – sometimes, as with Civil Beat here in Honolulu, they “scoop the big boys.”

And The Daily Beast just got a major scoop: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), is chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. And, according to The Daily Beast on Saturday, Nunes pulled a fast one.

Three committee officials and a former national security official with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast, “Rep. Devin Nunes was traveling with a senior committee staffer in an Uber on Tuesday evening when he received a communication on his phone . . . after the message, Nunes left the car abruptly, leaving his own staffer in the dark about his whereabouts. By the next morning, Nunes hastily announced a press conference. His own aides, up to the most senior level, did not know what their boss planned to say next. Nunes’ choice to keep senior staff out of the loop was highly unusual. The Republican chairman had a bombshell to drop. ʻThe intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition,ʻ Nunes told reporters Wednesday morning.”

Nunes, formerly a member of the GOP Presidential Transition Team and a steadfast Trump loyalist is supposedly heading an impartial investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. We say “supposedly” because it is clear that every step of the way Rep. Nunes has been either dragging his feet or curiously incurious about mounting indications of secret contacts, if not outright collusion, between members of the Trump campaign and Russian state actors (diplomats, privileged friends of Vladimir Putin, and/or outright spies).

It is evident that the White House, or at least the President himself, knows more than they are saying about what took place between themselves and the Russians. In the wee hours of March 4, as the clues piled up, Trump decided to tweet a totally unsubstantiated stink bomb accusing Barack Obama of a felony by “wiretapping” Trump Tower, a move designed to distract from the ever-tightening noose of evidence.

Now we know that Rep. Nunes, in the dead of night, got his hands on classified material highly relevant to the investigation then, hiding it from his own committee members, ran off to tell Donald Trump the bad news, to wit: Trump or his minions were incidentally discovered in contact with the Russians in the course of legally authorized surveillance of the latter by U.S. intelligence.

In other words, wanting to find out what the Russians were doing to harm the United States, people connected to Donald Trump (and perhaps Trump himself) were found to be in contact with them. Not only is this story not going away, it is getting more dangerous to the White House day-by-day.

As DJT might tweet, “BAD!”