A relentless focus on Russia allowed many other Trump scandals to escape the glare of legislative oversight.
The allegations at the center of Robert Mueller’s just-completed investigation, electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and obstruction of justice, were rightly considered the biggest presidential scandal in a generation, and perhaps in all of U. S. history.
They were also, for the purposes of congressional oversight, a monumental distraction.
Consider the following: The president promotes his corporate brands regularly and in plain sight, while a hotel he owns mere blocks from the White House rakes in profits from patrons, including foreign leaders, with business before the federal government. Cabinet secretaries reportedly violate ethical guidelines and conflict-of-interest rules left and right by spending lavishly on office furniture and official travel, or by failing to properly divest their business holdings. The president’s son-in-law obtains a security clearance over the objections of senior officials, and then—along with other top White House aides—conducts official government business using personal, unsecured devices and accounts. The president himself refuses to relinquish his personal cell phone, raising concerns that he is having conversations vulnerable to interception by hackers or foreign governments.
This entirely incomplete list of controversies during the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency is largely unrelated to the Russia probe. Some have been uncovered by journalists, and to varying extents, litigated in the courts or scrutinized by inspectors general. But what they have in common is that none have been the sole subject of a single hearing before Congress.
Individually, in any other administration, each allegation of impropriety or ethical lapse might rivet the nation and generate days worth of headlines, drawing the same horde of cameras and wall-to-wall cable coverage that accompanied the appearances before Congress of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, or James Comey, the fired FBI director. Yet just as the Russia investigation and its many offshoots have hovered like a dark cloud over the Trump presidency, so have they obscured the many scandals that have escaped the full measure of congressional scrutiny as a result. They haven’t been ignored, exactly, but they certainly haven’t gotten much attention—an assortment of munchable appetizers overshadowed by the slowly-roasting suckling pig everyone was waiting to be served.
Until January, there was a simple reason why Congress mostly ignored these secondary scandals, and it had little to do with Russia: Republicans in control of the House, staying loyal to Trump, were unwilling to draw attention to issues that could damage the president and cast the party more broadly in a negative light. Democrats vowed to conduct far more vigorous oversight once they took power, but nearly three months into their majority, they have been consumed by the Russia investigation, the 35-day government shutdown, and an understandable desire to focus both legislation and oversight on their own policy agenda. As a result, they have just barely begun to tackle controversies unrelated to Russia.
