House Speaker Paul Ryan is really ducking and weaving when it comes to saying whether he supports an investigation into Russian efforts to influence the election. But it looks like he’s leaning against trying to find out if anything significant happened
In a new statement, Ryan offers up a bunch of blah-blah-blah on how “We must condemn and push back forcefully against any state-sponsored cyberattacks on our democratic process.” But the only investigation he actually mentions is a generic reference to what the House Intelligence Committee has been doing all along, which has rather obviously fallen short on Russia and the election. And following that conspicuous non-endorsement of investigations specifically into the matter at hand:
At the same time, exploiting the work of our intelligence community for partisan purposes does a grave disservice to those professionals and potentially jeopardizes our national security. As we work to protect our democracy from foreign influence, we should not cast doubt on the clear and decisive outcome of this election.
Pause to laugh (bitterly) at the idea of the “clear and decisive outcome” of an election in which the person who got millions more votes is not the winner. After that pause, let’s focus on how Ryan is suggesting here that thinking we should maybe know what Russia did or didn’t do and what effects that did or didn’t have is some kind of partisan perversion of intelligence. If there’s anyone who should know what partisan perversion of intelligence looks like, it’s a Republican who had a close-up view on the Bush administration operating, but it seems like Ryan’s lesson learned was how to get away with stuff. His whip, Steve Scalise, put another line in the Republican playbook on display by trying to shift the blame to Obama.
The bottom line is that Ryan’s party would control the congressional investigations and he’s still afraid voters might learn something he didn’t want them to know.