Democrats are done pretending that Republicans are capable of providing any reasonable check on a pr*sident whose campaign team clearly tried to coordinate with Russia in hopes of defeating Hillary Clinton. It’s true that the House Intelligence investigation—with the fingerprints of White House errand boy Devin Nunes all over it—has been a lost cause for many months. But being blindsided by the nakedly partisan criminal referral issued by GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham on Russia whistleblower Christopher Steele seems to have pushed any remnant of bipartisanship past the point of no return. The Washington Post's Karoun Demirjian writes:
Senior Democratic officials in the Senate, frustrated by what they consider a Republican campaign to discredit the law enforcement and intelligence agencies investigating the president, cleared their members to release the interview transcript of one of the Russia investigation’s most sensitive witnesses and, separately, to publish a report detailing the disinformation and intimidation tactics the Kremlin deploys against democracies globally.
In the House, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed a letter sent Tuesday to Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), accusing him of orchestrating a campaign to bury a congressional probe into Trump’s alleged ties to the Russian government and defame the agencies investigating those matters.
This is the only rational response to GOP lawmakers who opened 2018 with a flurry of activity intended to insulate Donald Trump from the rule of law, investigate his investigators, and jail his political opponents. Republicans are enabling, empowering, and protecting Trump at all costs, as if he were a dictator.
[House Intelligence] Republicans, led by chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), are developing what’s been characterized as a “corruption” report about FBI officials involved in the Russia probe, while Democrats are writing a report of their own about what they see as GOP efforts to undercut and prematurely shutter the investigation.
House Democrats are incensed that the committee’s splintering probe is being eclipsed by new GOP-led investigations into the FBI’s conduct during the Clinton email scandal.
“House Republicans have chosen to put President Trump ahead of our national interests,” a group of six Democratic committee ranking members wrote to Ryan this week, suggesting he and other GOP leaders “have blocked, stonewalled, and rejected our basic requests to investigate, hold public hearings, and advance legislation” related to Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Don’t hold your breath for any acts of integrity or principle from Boy Wonder, but history is being made and the more that gets documented, the better.
On the Senate side, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) broke ranks with her GOP counterparts on the Judiciary Committee by releasing the testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson regarding the Steele dossier, and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) led Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee in issuing a 200-page report documenting Russia’s efforts to interfere in European elections.
For now, the only panel that is retaining even a whiff of bipartisanship is the Senate Intelligence Committee led by GOP North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr and Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner.