President Donald Trump, in case you haven't noticed, doesn't want people to talk about the ongoing investigation into potential connections between his campaign and the Russian government. Over the past year, he has deflected by insisting that Hillary Clinton needs to be investigated, wrongly claiming that Trump Tower was wiretapped, and arguing that the investigation is nothing more than a "Deep State" conspiracy against him.
Now Democrats are starting to call him out on it, particularly as the Trump team ramps up its work to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller's probe in the court of public opinion with the hope that, among other things, this would blunt the potentially negative effects it would have during the upcoming election.
"This is about whether any president is above the law or not. This is about whether having a rule of law in America is something that we value or something we're going to allow to be invaded upon because of political convenience," Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN on Monday.
I think we should make every effort possible to look forward and make sure that Americans know that our interest in what President Trump and his team did with the Russians, is mostly to prevent the Russians or any other enemy from attacking us again. Because our democracy can't take continued efforts like the Russians demonstrated, and to not look backward and make this about re-litigating the last election.
Responding Rep. Adam Schiff's, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, comments that it may be necessary to vote Republicans out of office who are carrying Trump's water at this time, Swalwell agreed.
"Well, I think that Ranking Member Schiff's point is that if they are not open to having their minds changed about holding the president accountable, then their seats are going to have to be changed," Swalwell told CNN.
Trump's fellow Republicans have for the most part avoided criticizing him. Although 86 percent of Republicans felt it was important for a president to set a good moral example when Bill Clinton was in the White House, that number has dropped to 63 percent of Republicans under Trump, according to CNN. By contrast, 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents said that moral leadership is important for a president (to be fair, the number for Democrats increased from 64 percent, where it has been during Clinton's presidency).
Republican politicians seem to be following their voters' example, as MSNBC host Joe Scarborough noted in a monologue on Tuesday triggered by reports that Trump had helped save a Chinese telecommunications company after it had given his family businesses favorable treatment.
"I’m tired of speeches," Scarborough vented. "I love Jeff Flake, and all these other guys. I’m tired of speeches. You want to do something? You know what, there are two votes. Jeff Flake needs to find somebody else. Whatever the issue is, if it’s ZTE, you go to Bob Corker, you go to somebody else and say, you know what? I know, personally, because we did this, and say, ‘We’re shutting the floor down. We’re not going to pass anything else. We’re not going to pass any, any of your, any of your appointments, we not going to do anything until you come over here and your people talk to us.'"
Even the handful of prominent Republicans who have criticized the president have mostly shied away from directly addressing his attempts to derail an investigation into his alleged misconduct.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who was an outspoken critic of Trump as far back as October, has agreed to meet Trump at a Nashville airport on Tuesday night and then accompany him at a subsequent rally and fundraiser.
"I don't consider the president a role model for my kids. I don’t want my kids to speak the way he speaks or make some of the choices, and it has been the challenge for quite a bit of time to say, how do you balance this out between policy and personal behavior in the way he has his own unique style," Sen. James Lankford, R-Ok., told MSNBC in an interview published on Sunday. "I don’t speak that way. I don’t tweet that way. I don’t interact with people that way. I don’t treat my staff the way that he treats his staff."
He added, "But that is who the American people selected, and that’s who we are going to be able to work with."
Former Republican presidential candidate (and current Utah Senate candidate) Mitt Romney expressed similar sentiments.
"I don't think I would point to the president as a role model for my grandkids on the basis of his personal style. He has departed in some cases from the truth, and has attacked in a way that I think is not entirely appropriate," Romney told NBC News on Tuesday.
Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to advance his latest deflection, baselessly claiming that the Mueller probe is attempting to influence the 2018 midterm elections.
This isn't the first time that the Trump team has raised the specter of the impending midterm elections when discussing the Mueller investigation.
Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani recently mused to Politico that the investigation would actually convince Republican voters to turn out to the polls to protect their president, a stance seemingly at odds with Trump's implied assertion that the Mueller investigation would somehow meddle in the midterms.
Trump also posted a tweet in which he quoted conservative commentator Mollie Hemingway in her claim that the FBI had spied on Trump's campaign.
Although an FBI informant did gather information about Trump's campaign, there is no evidence that they did anything improper or out of the ordinary for potential criminal investigations.
Trump has a number of ties to Russia, from his business empire to his political advisers, many of whom have had to resign since Trump took office as a result of their own ties. These ties have sharpened media suspicions that Trump may have colluded with Russia during the election, especially in light of the revelation that Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign associates met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the campaign for "dirt "on Hillary Clinton, as well as the fact that the hacked Democratic National Committee servers were believed to have been infiltrated by individuals working for the Russian government.
The recent tweet storm can be viewed as an attempt by Trump to shape the narrative surrounding the investigation into his presidency. As the 2018 midterm elections approach, Republicans have suffered a string of early defeats which many GOP strategists worry is a sign that the party could endure even greater losses in November.
One possible reason for the Republican Party's silence on the Russian meddling was that, during the 2016 midterm elections, many of the documents stolen from the Democratic Party were surreptitiously leaked to a super PAC linked to Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan so that Republicans could use it against Democrats during the general election. As Kelly Ward, executive director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told The New York Times in December 2016, "This is not a traditional tit-for-tat on a partisan political campaign, where one side hits the other and then you respond. This is an attack by a foreign actor that had the intent to disrupt our election, and we were the victims of it."
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