Republicans are in a rush to take from the poor, give to the rich, reward insurance executives, and keep America orange. And certainly a bill that’s literally life or death for millions of Americans demands attention.
But while the media sometimes appears to have the attention span of a gnat, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Trump regime is already beset by at least three serious scandals.
First, there’s the ever-growing set of connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia. That massive, tangled web includes Trump’s financial connections to oligarchs, Manafort’s tie to pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, Wilbur Ross’s entanglement in the Bank of Cyprus, Rex Tillerson and Carter Page’s ties to Rosneft, everybody chatting with Sergey Kislyak … and that little item where the Russians hacked into servers during the election, stole emails, and handed them over to “I love Wikileaks.” Enough shoes have already dropped in this story to open a Payless, and it’s just getting started.
Then there’s Trump’s accusation against President Obama over wiretaps that Obama says didn’t happen, that the FBI says didn’t happen, and that everyone asked about it says didn’t happen. But Trump is insisting on a full-blown congressional investigation of this non-event, partly because he heard it on Breitbart—but mostly because his jealousy of Obama is boundless.
And, lest we forget, there’s also Trump’s ludicrous claim that he would have won the popular vote were it not for “millions of illegal voters.” That claim is so over the top that this week even Jason ‘Benghazi-or-bust’ Chaffetz quietly decided he wouldn’t bother to investigate.
"The president said that he thought there was 'widespread voter fraud,'" Chaffetz told CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday morning.
"I don't see any evidence of that. We're not doing an investigation of that.”
Donald Trump leveled an enormous, democracy-in-crisis charge, never produced any evidence, and the charge was so without merit that even Republicans are refusing to check it out. Shouldn’t that be getting a little attention?
Though Chaffetz refused to look into ridiculous claim No. 1, he is going to spend taxpayer dollars on ridiculous claim No. 2.
Chaffetz said that while the Oversight Committee won't conduct a probe into voter fraud, it will look into the president's recent allegations that his campaign was wiretapped by the Obama administration.
How many thousands of hours of nothing-to-see will it take for Republicans to end this investigation? You can ask Hillary Clinton, or check back in November of 2020.
What about that first item, the one where Trump and his team have more Russian names in their background than the Brothers Karamazov? Sean Spicer was very careful to say that there’s no action on that front.
White House officials declared on Wednesday that President Trump was not the target of an investigation, five days after Mr. Trump himself raised the prospect with an unsubstantiated claim that his predecessor ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower.
The fun thing about that statement is that Spicer at first seemed to suggest that the wiretapping of Trump Tower might have been related to an investigation. And then ... a paper was delivered to his podium mid-press conference.
After first refusing to disavow Mr. Trump’s allegations, made in a series of Twitter posts, and instead calling for Congress to investigate them, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters, “There is no reason that we have to think the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever.”
Mr. Spicer’s statement, which he read from a sheet of paper that was handed to him at the end of his briefing, reinforced the conundrum Mr. Trump’s tweets have created for the White House: Either the president’s assertions are baseless, or he may have implicated himself in a government investigation of contacts between his presidential campaign and Russia.
Spicer’s reaction to the arrival of the paper was that of a kid caught with both hands and one foot in the cookie jar. His hasty, shaky reading of the contents suggested that whoever scrawled the note for him likely included a lot of exclamation points, and perhaps a few comments that Spicer didn’t share.
Meanwhile, Rachael Maddow reminds us that the dossier—remember the dossier?—seems to contain more than a little truth.