All this time after Watergate we have the modern version of All The President’s Men, just without the break-in.
All this time after Watergate we have the modern version of All The President’s Men, just without the break-in.
You start with a political hack like Rep. Devin Nunes, who has to know he is through after his current term in Congress —but who produces a memo about supposed corruption and bias in the Justice Department that is about as well-written as a ransom note.
But it is not Nunes alone who comes after the DOJ and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who authorized the hiring of special counsel Robert Mueller, and comes after Mueller himself. It is not just President Trump, even as Trump claims on Twitter that Nunes’ memo completely vindicates the President.
Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, has revealed himself too in this shabby process. Mostly Ryan has done this by doing nothing to stop Nunes from releasing a memo that only the wingnuts from the bullhorn media treat like the Pentagon Papers. Somehow Ryan engages in a tyranny of silence even as he keeps talking, and talking, and talking, usually out of both sides of his mouth.
Ryan is absolutely a part of this, along with all the others from a Republican Congress who take their marching orders from this President. What is even more troubling is the way these bindlestiffs allow state-run screamers at Fox News to set the political agenda in our country. It’s like letting the kids with the painted faces at college basketball games run their schools’ athletic departments.
There are all these sanctimonious and self-appointed defenders of liberty from the House’s Freedom Caucus, such as Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N. C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a zealot in shirtsleeves. There are sidemen like Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.
And the appropriately named Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho, who kept telling everyone who would listen to him how «shocked» everybody would be by Nunes’ memo — a memo largely built around government surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump operative who calls to mind the old line from John Schulian about mice aspiring to be rats.
There is Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, outgoing chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, a guy blessedly not running for reelection. Goodlatte says that Nunes’ memo reflects problems at the «highest levels» of the Justice Department.
No. Just the highest levels of the Judiciary Committee.
And always there is Sen. Mitch McConnell, who despite occasional tough talk, has become as much a compliant wingman for this President as the rest of them.
All the President’s Men, 2018.
Of course this is just the short list of people willing to attack anything and anyone in the FBI and Justice Department if it will somehow keep Mueller and his men and women away from this President.
«This (memo) is a political story that’s helpful to the President,» says Rep. Adam Schiff, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and someone who continues to behave like not just an honorable public servant but a bit of an American hero.
Here is Ryan, in a statement almost breathtakingly phony:
«What this is not is an indictment on our institutions, of our justice system. This memo is not an indictment of the FBI, of the Department of Justice. It does not impugn investigation or the deputy attorney general.»
Even a political grasper like Ryan knows better than that. This is only about impugning the integrity of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Only about impugning the deputy attorney general, Rosenstein, who is Mueller’s last line of defense.
These people conveniently forget that were it not for the FBI, and former director James Comey announcing in the last days of the last presidential campaign that the bureau was reopening its investigation of Hillary Clinton, that Trump would likely never have been elected in the first place.
Now, though, they want suckers to believe that the FBI, and the Justice Department, are more liberal than Bernie Sanders. So Nunes, with the full support of the president’s men, produces this sketchy memo as if it is some sort of smoking gun. It is smoke all right, but the kind that evokes another expression out of Watergate, from Jimmy Breslin, about how so often political power is illusion, produced by blue smoke and mirrors.
These people have power for now, but not forever — power they clearly think they can swing like a club at Rosenstein and Mueller. They are desperate to destroy Mueller’s investigation, or at least obstruct it, before he officially comes after Trump on obstruction of justice.
They want you to believe that rogue Justice Department officials can get the kind of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant they got on Page as easily as you can have things overnighted to you by Amazon.
Somehow they succeed in getting enough suckers in this country to believe them. And to believe Mueller is the threat here to the rule of law. If you believe that, you believe pigs can fly.
Richard Nixon was wasting his time with guys like Haldeman and Erlichman. All he needed to keep on keeping on was a compliant Congress like this one.
