In support of Even Stupider Pizzagate, Republicans gathered today to look over documents containing classified information pertaining to an FBI intelligence source. And this information was treated with the care and deference the Trump White House always provides.
Since the White House has already stated that Donald Trump could look at the documents if he wanted to and refused to say that he hadn’t already done so, it seems shockingly inconsequential that one of the attorneys involved in protecting Trump came in to get a peek at inside information on a potential witness in an ongoing investigation.
The Republican plan to deal with the Trump–Russia investigation hasn’t changed from the moment it started. From Devin Nunes leaping from an Uber to scheme with a Michael Flynn croney in the White House basement, or Nunes creating a memo based on documents he purposely did not bother to read, or Trump shaking his Twitter finger at journalists for not picking up his personally-coined term for Even Stupider Pizzagate, the plan is the same: Generate a pretend scandal that can be blamed on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as a means of dismissing the real scandal in which Trump is embroiled up to his neck. If he had one.
The New York Times may say that Trump is repeating “unconfirmed claims,” and the AP may report that Trump is embellishing reports. But the easiest and most truthful way of putting it is that Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans are complicit in creating a lie—one that is purposely designed to damage the credibility of the FBI and Department of Justice in order to protect Trump. At any cost.
Donald Trump’s efforts to force the media into using his frame for current events has rarely been as clumsy, creaking, and obvious as it is with the term “Spygate.” The inaccurate and patently ludicrous coinage was invented by Trump expressly because he thought the word “spy,” seemed “more nefarious.”
But whether or not Trump really believes in Even Stupider Pizzagate, the grand gathering of Republicans come together in their latest attempt at derailment is over. Now it only remains to be seen what kind of “unconfirmed” and “embellished” approach they will use.
The meeting for the “Gang of Eight,” which will include some Democratic lawmakers, is still upcoming. But the noise coming out of the Republican gathering is ... amazingly un-noisy.
Devin Nunes hawked his substance-free “unmasking” attack for days before the whole thing collapsed in a level of embarrassment that Republicans have since wildly exceeded. In fact, the claims that Trump has been making on a daily basis about Spy- ... Even Stupider Pizzagate are much worse than those Nunes was stating a year ago. With that kind of build-up, it seems a little amazing, and actually a bit disconcerting, that Republicans didn’t emerge from viewing the documents with a pre-digested set of talking points and a line of Congressmen queued up to give their support to the latest in attacks on the FBI.
Maybe it’s just that Republicans determined that this nothing burger was so nothing that even they couldn’t make up something to make it seem like it had import. But that … seems unlikely.
Republicans are staying quiet as the Gang of Eight gathers, joined by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—and once again unaccountably accompanied by both John Kelly and Emmett Flood. Maybe, after all the build up Trump has given this moment, it’s all going to end in one tiny fizzle.
But right now it seems quiet. Too quiet.