Faced with unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has compromising information on Donald Trump and somewhat more substantiated allegations that someone on his team was in contact with Russia during the campaign, Republicans … just really don’t want to know what’s true and what’s not. It’s so much simpler to dismiss, deny, and be outraged than to risk the possibility of finding out that their guy might not just be an ignorant narcissistic unrepentant liar and sexual predator. He might also be vulnerable to blackmail by an authoritarian state whose interests we know he’s already tilting Republican policy toward.
But no, Republicans don’t want to know. They don’t want to know to find out if the allegations can be proven false, and they definitely don’t want to risk finding out that the allegations are true.
“There are politics being played . . . from my standpoint, it certainly appears that way. There seems to be an effort somewhere to undermine the legitimacy of this election,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Sure. According to intelligence agencies, Russia tried to undermine the election ahead of time. The legitimacy of the election and of American democracy was undermined by the fact that the person who will become president lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes. But Democrats cautiously suggesting that perhaps some raw intelligence should be investigated and either substantiated or falsified—that’s where politics is being played? Or is it the fact that these long-rumored allegations finally surfaced that’s politics being played, even though this came after the election (unlike, say, FBI Director James Comey’s pre-election letter that maybe possibly there were some additional Hillary Clinton emails)?
“It doesn’t look like a very good intelligence product to me, glancing at it,” [House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes] told reporters.
Nunes said his “next steps” would be “asking for all of the underlying data” behind broader intelligence reports he has seen and “combing through it.”
Oh, okay. Trump ally Devin Nunes is going to personally comb through stuff and that’s how we’ll get to the bottom of this. By Nunes coming out and saying that his private personal investigation of the information he dismissed as not looking like a very good intelligence product based on a quick glance has now cleared the guy he supports. That will restore public confidence! And man, Nunes is quite the intelligence expert to be able to assess and dismiss at a glance intelligence coming from a British ex-spy who now works in private intelligence and serves as an FBI source. It’s almost like he’s just coming to the conclusion he wants to reach.
Look. A lot of this might be false. But shouldn’t we know that? And that means investigations of the source of the intelligence, not partisan dismissals and refusal to investigate.