Republicans loyal to Donald Trump were in favor of partisan investigations before they were against them. We’ll circle back to this point presently.
For the last several months, President Trump has been desperately attempting to convince his Red Hat automatons that the investigations into the Russian attack on the 2016 election, along with the Trump campaign’s apparent links to the same, have constituted an unprecedented scandal “worse than Watergate,” a partisan witch hunt orchestrated by Democrats. More shocking than Trump’s actual claim is the fact that his people believe his nonsense, despite the fact that every investigation so far has been conducted by Republicans -- some of whom have voted to support Trump’s agenda every time.
Before we dig into the rank absurdity of the claim, let's remind you of Trump's tweets on Sunday morning, which appeared especially unraveled:
More than anything else, the president’s tweets represent the shrieking lament of a man who can feel the legal noose tightening and has no narrative of innocence to speak of. Not once has Trump tried to explain what was really going on with the numerous contacts between his campaign henchmen and Russians, not to mention the new revelations about possible conspiracies with leaders from Arab Gulf nations including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The closest he’s ever come to such an explanation has been to repeatedly emphasize his ongoing mission to flip the script and make it appear that the Democrats were the actual conspirators with Russia and also that they conducted an “unfair” infiltration of his campaign before the election.
I’m not breaking any news when I repeat that every Trump-Russia investigation has been conducted by Trump’s fellow Republicans: There are the chairs of the various congressional committees; Trump’s appointees at the FBI and the Justice Department (Christopher Wray, Rod Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions); and the heads of the intelligence community, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and NSA Director Mike Rogers. Of course, we also know that Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey are longtime Republicans. (According to Comey's recent memoir, he's now an independent.) Other than Comey, who’s now off the clock, everyone else running the Trump-Russia investigations at DOJ is either a Republican, a Trump-appointee confirmed by Senate Republicans or someone hired by such a Trump appointee.
Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has publicly announced that his committee was able to verify portions of the Christopher Steele dossier, while also confirming that the Russians meddled in the 2016 presidential campaign specifically to help Trump, thus exploding Trump’s “fake dossier” tweets as well as his O.J. Simpson-style switcheroo about the Democrats being the real colluders.
But OK: “13 heavily conflicted Democrats,” the president wrote on Sunday. Sen. Burr and the other Republicans on his committee, not to mention Wray, Sessions and Rosenstein, must be wondering when they switched parties.
On top of this obvious and easily debunked lie, Trump is juggernauting his way into a new phase in his effort to abuse power and obstruct justice (see above “I hereby order . . .” tweet). His intention now appears to be to force Sessions to investigate whether political motives triggered the FBI’s initial probe of the Trump campaign back in 2015 and 2016. To describe Trump’s accusation of a pre-election partisan attack as being unfounded and fact-free is to vastly understate Trump’s lack of documentary or reportorial evidence. Anyway, what possible good did this allegedly partisan witch hunt do for Hillary Clinton? Its existence was never made public, so it logically cannot have influenced voters. And in case you hadn't noticed, Trump won the election. Those who buy into the context of Trump’s fictional universe must also believe that the FBI really sucked at undermining his campaign.
Much as with his canard about 3 million “illegal voters” in California, Trump is once again tilting at windmills and repeating wild speculation he heard on "Fox & Friends" rather than citing facts. On that flimsy basis, he intends to push us one step closer to a constitutional crisis, pitting himself and his co-conspirators on the House Intelligence Committee against his own GOP-approved appointees at the Justice Department.
Of course, it won’t matter to Trump that no one from the FBI “infiltrated” or “surveilled” his campaign. In reality, what happened is that a former academic who was working on the campaign chose to serve as an informant for the FBI and met with low-level campaign officials Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos. Trumpers would do well to research the myriad differences between a spy and an informant.
None of those details even register for Trump and his Red Hat army. His mission isn’t to uncover facts but instead to destroy the integrity and reputation of America’s top cops. By the time we reach the end of this line of attack, Trump will either be rebuffed by Sessions, Rosenstein, et al., or the heads of the Justice Department will resign in protest rather than hand over FBI evidence to House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes, R-Calif., or the White House.
But what if the pre-election phase of the investigation was partisan, like Trump and Fox News are suggesting? If partisan investigations are considered to be inherently illegitimate, why weren’t Trump and his loyalists protesting the eight Republican-led congressional investigations into the 2012 Benghazi attack? Five House committees, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Homeland Security Committee and the House Select Committee on Benghazi all vigorously pursued the Obama administration (especially the then-secretary of state; who was that again?) in the wake of the attack. Concurrently, there were Republican investigations into Hillary Clinton’s private email account as well as the Uranium One deal and several other non-scandal scandals from that era.
If partisanship invalidates investigations, then logic mandates that the Benghazi and email investigations, among various others, never should have occurred.
Sadly, we’ve traveled well beyond the strictures of logic and rationality. Trump has dragged the nation into a phantom zone of crisis, madness and institutional damage, all in the name of shielding himself from legal accountability. He’s that entitled guy who, having been pulled over for speeding, accuses the patrolman of speeding to catch up with him -- Trump is that guy who protests the ticket by announcing his plans to put the system on trial. He’s beyond self-satire now, but while his counterattacks appear silly, he’s growing ever more dangerous the more he feels himself ensnared by the tightening gauntlet of the law.
Trump always makes things worse for Trump. This observation has proven true time and time again, even though the rest of us are too often hit by the spatter. The more he tries to wiggle free, the more he becomes tangled in his own machinations and ridiculousness. Justice will be served, I believe. And in the end, it will be served by members of both parties who, unlike this misbegotten president, will be rewarded by posterity.
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