The GOP has lost its integrity
Update: Adding information below about Rep. Nunes “regret” for his decision to brief the President before committee members Wednesday.
We are truly facing a Constitutional crisis, and I am at a loss for a solution. After Monday’s Intelligence Committee hearing, I was hopeful that Rep. Nunes was going to lead an appropriate investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.
The hearing itself was remarkable. While there was a lot of “we cannot comment on that,” the FBI director and the head of the National Security Agency shared enough for us to know now that — without doubt, Russia absolutely got involved in U.S. politics, marshaled forces against Hillary Clinton, and took steps that ultimately helped Donald Trump become president. What we don’t know is whether anyone in the Trump campaign directly worked with Russian interests. That’s why there needs to be a full, impartial investigation.
Sadly, any hope of a full, fair, impartial investigation may have disappeared Tuesday, when Intelligence Committee Chair Nunes took it upon himself to go to the White House and share information privately with President Trump — before sharing it with other committee members, and not including the ranking Democrat on the committee. This is an extraordinary breach of protocol and tradition, and it is also an untenable breach of integrity.
One of the most basic principles of legal procedure is that you don’t brief the target of an investigation outside of proper channels.
Nunes meeting with Pres. Trump Wednesday was at least as bad — arguably far worse — than the airport meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton during the Clinton email investigation last year. The Lynch meeting should not have happened, and it was stupid, but the innocent explanation for it was credible. But Lynch absolutely had to step back from any involvement in the email prosecution decision after that meeting — just because of the way it looked.
There is no such innocent explanation for what Rep. Nunes did today. He said himself that he decided that the classified information that he saw today was important enough that he wanted the president to know about it.
This raises many questions.
Here’s a really good explanation of all the legal reasons why Nunes made a very serious mistake:
Or put more bluntly by Sen. Elizabeth Warren:
Nunes was seeing the information because it was relevant to the investigation that he was leading. It was provided to him by agencies that report to the president. This misstep has jeopardized our ability to find out what actually happened last year — and what Russia may continue to be doing. Isn’t that Nunes’ primary responsibility?
Congress has the duty of oversight of the Executive branch. The Constitutional responsibility should take priority over party loyalty. This should not be even a question.
There was no reason why Rep. Nunes could not have waited a few minutes to get the ranking member Rep. Schiff on the phone and say, “We need to go to the White House.”
Our system is dangerously fractured and the solution is not clear.
This is truly a Constitutional crisis, unlike anything I think we have seen before. And Russia is poised to take full advantage. North Korea, China, and ISIS are probably buying popcorn too.
Here’s Dan Rather’s take:
On Thursday, Nunes acknowledged that perhaps he made a judgement error. The problem is that he is chair of the House Intelligence Committee, one of a very few members of our government who has access to some of the most sensitive information that anyone ever gets to see. He demonstrated Wednesday that he cannot be trusted with that access.
