House Speaker Paul Ryan again repeated Thursday that the sham GOP memo "does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the Deputy Attorney General." The only problem for Ryan, who made the comments during a press conference at the GOP retreat in West Virginia, is that members of his own conference know exactly who the memo is targeting.
Literally minutes before Ryan tried to deny the Nunes memo was an indictment of the nation's top law enforcement institutions, New York Rep. Lee Zeldin told MSNBC that the memo's release would absolutely impugn the leadership of those agencies.
"The main issue is the fact that it's going showing misconduct on the part of top people at the DOJ and the FBI. You're going to see a need for a change to certain practices up there. There's going to be a need for a change of certain personnel at the top. [...] There's going to have to be a change to certain practices and there's going to have to be a change to some personnel towards the highest levels of the DOJ and FBI."
That directly contradicts how Speaker Ryan has gone about defending the release of the memo, which he claims will simply serve as a check on the process for obtaining a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil American citizens.
"What concerns me is if we're violating civilian liberties," Ryan told reporters Thursday. (Wow, talk about upside-down world—Republicans fretting over civil liberties abuses.)
During the same press conference, Mitch McConnell said he hadn't seen the memo (House Republicans haven't even provided it to GOP Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr). But McConnell added, "I don't have any suggestions to make to the speaker—I think he's handling it just right.” Of course, that's not what GOP Sen. John Thune told reporters hours earlier.
The press conference (as televised on MSNBC) appeared to be brief, with lots of questions about the memo, which Ryan and McConnell were less than keen to answer.
But again, here's Ryan on the memo:
"What this is not, is an indictment on our institutions, of our justice system. This memo is not an indictment of the FBI, of the Department of Justice. It does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the Deputy Attorney General."
Meanwhile, Zeldin is saying there will "have" to be personnel changes to leadership at the DOJ and FBI. That directly implicates Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, since he signed the reauthorization of the FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page.
What’s really important about the memo is whom it blames for all of this: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The memo, per a New York Times account, says that Rosenstein is the one who signed off on this sham FISA application.
And if you impugn Rosenstein, then you're getting at the heart of the Mueller probe into Russia since Rosenstein is overseeing it.
Trump has been angling to get at Rosenstein and then Mueller for a very long time now and Paul Ryan is working hard to clear his path to getting there.