GOP House Mice Put Trump Before Country
YUP.
http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2017/02/15/gop-house-mice-put-trump-before-country/jcr:content/image.crop.800.500.jpg/49571297.cached.jpg
Carlos Barria / Reuters
GOP House Mice Put Trump Before Country
The tough guys who were rolling up their sleeves to get President Clinton even before the election are awfully quiet now.
Michael Tomasky
02.15.17 12:03 AM ET
I take you back in time now to a story from last October, by The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel. I remember well the pit that formed in my stomach as I read the headline: “House Republicans are already preparing for ‘years’ of investigations of Clinton.”
Weigel nabbed an interview with Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, who said this: “It’s a target-rich environment. Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.”
Back when he and just about everyone else thought the next president was going to be named Clinton, Chaffetz was telling—bragging to, actually—one of the country’s top political reporters that President Clinton was going to be investigated immediately.........................
But she is not the president. Donald Trump is. And he, we have decent reason to suspect, may have directed Mike Flynn to negotiate with Russia in the midst of the presidential campaign. We don’t know this of course. ........................
This would seem to be something we’d want to find out.
And what does Chaffetz say now about all this, after Flynn’s resignation? “It’s taking care of itself,” he told a Politico reporter. Let the intelligence committee do it, Chaffetz said.
Well, that might be OK. In jurisdictional terms, Chaffetz actually has a point. But David Nunes, the California Republican who chairs intel, says, per Vox, that he won’t look into anything having to do with what Trump may or may not have said to Flynn. He cites executive privilege.
Trump of course wasn’t the chief executive at the time in question, late December.
So I think I have this right. Here are the new rules: If you’re a Democratic president-elect, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives will start investigating you before you’ve even interviewed possible Treasury secretaries. But if you’re a Republican president-elect, you can maybe violate the Logan Act and undermine the sitting president—with the country’s top global adversary, no less—and, well, you can just do that. Chaffetz, obviously feeling heat, did agree Tuesday afternoon to do something, but not about Russia. He sent Reince Priebus a mealy-mouthed letter saying gosh, golly, sir, maybe the president of the United States could try not to talk about a matter like a North Korean missile launch in public.
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