The Mueller report, even with all its redactions, shows an erratic, deeply corrupt, highly disqualified Donald Trump, and a team around him intent on saving him from himself—and their own asses—by refusing to go along with his illegal demands. (At least when it came to the Russia probe; they were more than happy to go along with putting babies in cages and banning Muslims from entry to the U.S.) But what it also reveals is a Republican Party that is rotten to the very core, one that didn't just look the other way when confronted with evidence that a foreign adversary helped install Trump in the White House, but in effect assisted Russia's interference, and the subsequent cover-up efforts.
We've known for quite some time that the majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, was aware in the summer of 2016 that Russia was working to help his party's nominee be elected, that nominee being Trump. McConnell, who had previously said about Trump that "it's pretty obvious he doesn't know a lot about the issues," and that "I object to a whole series of things that he's said—vehemently object to them," and that Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country was "inconsistent with American values," went on to actively suppress the information that Russia was interfering to elect Trump. Why? That was revealed in an interview he gave when it was clear Trump was getting the nomination. "I want to win the election, and I have to say Donald Trump has done a good job so far of winning elections," McConnell said. "I hope he can win one more."
It wasn't just McConnell, of course. There's the now infamous conversation between then-House Speaker Paul Ryan and Rep. Kevin McCarthy in June 2016, when McCarthy "joked" that "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump." At the time, Ryan may or may not have known about Russia's election interference, but he certainly knew about it later, since he was briefed at the same time McConnell was in the late summer of 2016, when the entire Gang of Eight—congressional leadership and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees—was briefed.
That group included Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. And lookie what Mueller uncovered about him: He was leaking information he received from the FBI to the White House. Specifically, the Gang of Eight was briefed on March 9, 2017, by then-FBI Director James Comey about the status of the investigation, including "an identification of the principal U.S. subjects of the investigation." A week later, Burr spilled the beans to the White House. On March 16, 2017, the report says, the White House counsel's office was briefed by Burr on "4-5 targets" of the FBI's investigation. That's according to notes taken by then-White House counsel Don McGahn's chief of staff, Annie Donaldson.
We've known for years now that high-level Republican leadership was looking the other way. Now we also know just a bit about how deep those efforts may have gone in the party, and in the government. For example, there’s Barbara Ledeen, a long-time aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley and a member of the Judiciary Committee staff. She is also married to Michael Ledeen, who co-authored a book with Michael Flynn. Ledeen, according to the Mueller report, was working with Trump aide Flynn in the attempt to get Hillary Clinton's emails. "Ledeen began her efforts to obtain the Clinton emails before Flynn's request, as early as December 2015," Mueller details. That month, she emailed another of Flynn's conspirators, Peter Smith, with a proposal to obtain Clinton's private emails. She said the emails "were classified" and had been "purloined by our enemies." According to Mueller's report, the proposal said the "Clinton email server was, in all likelihood, breached long ago," and that the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could "re-assemble the server's email content."
She told Smith in an email that "if even a single email was recovered and the providence [sic] of the email was a foreign service, it would be catastrophic to the Clinton campaign." The report says that Ledeen did obtain the cache of emails. In a statement released Thursday, Grassley's spokesperson said "Ledeen's inquiry was not authorized by the Judiciary Committee" and she did this in her "personal time" out of "concern for her two sons who are Marines and daughter who serves as a civilian." Yes, she was looking for information to destroy the Clinton campaign not out of partisan politics, but because of her children.
Ledeen's position on the Judiciary Committee staff wasn't jeopardized at all by this activity, which was first revealed by the FBI in 2016, and her name was initially redacted in the FBI’s documents. The committee confirmed her involvement then. But she wasn't dismissed. Instead, Grassley's spokesperson says, "She was instructed not to do any further follow-up once the committee learned of her involvement." Just to make this point very clear: She was working for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and her job was in fact to help vet nominees, and she was trafficking classified emails she knew were stolen by foreign adversaries to try to torpedo a presidential campaign. And she kept her job.
The nation faces a dire crisis right now, with Donald Trump in the White House. But it's a crisis that's been a long time in coming—as long as the Republican Party has determined that any ends justify the means of winning power—as far back as Richard Nixon and all the way through Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to Donald Trump. Read again that quote from McConnell on Trump: "I want to win the election, and I have to say Donald Trump has done a good job so far of winning elections. […] I hope he can win one more." He knew very well what Trump was, and he didn't give a damn, as long as he won.
That's the cancer on the nation: the Republican Party. Trump is just the oozing manifestation of it. From McConnell on down to Barr and to who knows how many rank-and-file Republican operatives, the party is utterly, irredeemably corrupted. Until it is completely eradicated, ground down into the dirt and that earth salted and the party forced to start from scratch, we can't be whole as a nation again.
