In normal times, stoking a flurry of rumor and innuendo about an investigation involving the president in the hours preceding his nationally televised State of the Union address might seem like a distraction. But these are not normal times.
On Monday night, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee rushed to weaponize the secret memo they have been hyping for weeks—voting to release it to the White House just 24 hours prior to Donald Trump's big SOTU debut. They also blocked release of the corresponding Democratic memo and refused to let FBI Director Christopher Wray brief them on the underlying intelligence surrounding the memo before voting to release it.
This seems about par for the course for a White House that has never hewed to any standard norms or practices in Washington. Far from the spectacle overshadowing the message of Trump's State of the Union, the spectacle is the GOP message. They will spend the entirety of Tuesday rallying around the charge that corruption in the upper echelons at the nation's top law enforcement agencies stands to threaten Trump's presidency and indeed America itself. In fact, it would not be surprising at all for Trump to use the House panel’s party-line vote to bludgeon those agencies during his address.
As presidential historian Michael Beschloss noted, 44 years ago tonight, a beleaguered President Richard Nixon tried to rally the nation to his side: "I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end," Nixon said on January 30, 1974. "One year of Watergate is enough!"
But in some ways, it won't matter what Trump does or doesn’t say in his speech. The GOP circus—once aptly described as a goat rodeo—will dominate news coverage throughout the day with Republican lawmakers wielding the Nunes memo as a weapon to beat back Trump's critics and cast a pall over the Russia investigation. In the eyes of Republicans, the more attention, the better. Indeed, GOP lawmakers on the House Intel panel shamelessly took the vote in the wake of news that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe had been forced out of the agency under pressure of a months-long campaign by Trump himself.
As journalist Sam Stein noted, what's so stunning about today's politics is the fact that the more information is revealed that impugns Trump, the more Republican lawmakers cling to him.
Every day, that thesis proves more true. As Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of California noted Monday night on MSNBC: "They are willing to walk the plank for the president."
We are nearing the brink, folks. Trump's continued effort to remove exactly everyone associated with the Russian investigation who he doesn't think is adequately doing his dirty work is as paranoid and tyrannical as the actions taken by President Richard Nixon during Watergate. But what we don't seem to have now are any GOP lawmakers who are willing to serve as a check on that power in the fashion that Tennessee Republican Howard Baker did when he leveled one of the most famous political questions of all time during a 1973 Senate inquiry into Watergate: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"
The total absence of that influence in the Republican party has former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks worried.
"This is one of the worst days that I have seen—it really makes me frightened for democracy," Wine-Banks told MSNBC's Chris Heyes Monday of the GOP vote to release their memo while blocking the Democratic response. "If you’re releasing one, you have to release both. You cannot let the American public sit and linger on what could be a totally false out-of-context report. So I am really frightened for the first time in this investigation."