Le GOP: C’est Trump — A Coda
As a coda to yesterday’s blog post (written before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing), I offer the following observations based on the testimony of Sally Yates and James Clapper, the reporting that Obama warned Trump not to hire Flynn, prior news reports, and the actions of the Republican senators during the hearing:
1. Donald Trump and his team aggressively and actively ignored the fact that Michael Flynn was a national security threat and only got rid of him after the threat was exposed to the public. There is no reason to believe that Flynn would have been forced out but for the fact of this public exposure; to the contrary, all evidence supports the conclusion that the only reason he is gone is that the Trump administration was forced to get rid of him because of the terrible optics of aiding and abetting, embedding, and nurturing a man who who threatened this country’s national security.
2. Trump and his team, and the GOP, did not care, and appear to continue not to care, that Flynn acted as an undisclosed paid agent of the Turkish government while advising the Trump campaign (a role the campaign knew he had, but left it to Flynn to disclose or not); that Flynn accepted money from the Kremlin-backed RT in apparent violation of U.S. law; that Flynn had multiple contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that he denied having; that Flynn spoke with Russia five times on December 29th, the day the Obama administration imposed sanctions for on Russia for its interference with the U.S. election, to discuss those very sanctions; and, of course, that Flynn had an in-person, secret meeting with Kislyak and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower in which the lifting of sanctions was discussed in early December.
3. Watching sitting U.S. senators of one political party, to a man — and they were all men — attempt to discredit and grill a (female) career public servant, focus their questioning on whether she had leaked information or unmasked Trump associates, without even pretending to pay lip-service to having a concern about Russian interference in the election or the Trump team’s astonishing disregard for national security and repeated lies, was a grotesque and shocking spectacle. Ben Sasse was the only Republican senator who even asked about the Russian interference. Despite my loathing of the GOP — which has been built up over years based on its tactics and conduct even more than its so-called values — and despite my recognition, which I’ve commented on many times and reaffirmed here only yesterday, that the GOP will not act as a check or balance on Trump and that it is their active support for him that enables him to continue his Constitutional violations and to endanger our national security and demolish our democratic norms — despite all of of this, I found myself blown away by the depth of their transparent indifference to the Russians’ acts of virtual cyberwar against our democratic system of government, simply because their party happens to have been the beneficiary of that intervention and attack. These are people who, it appears, will not defend the United States from foreign intervention and hostile acts if those acts benefit their party.
Let that sink in.
Indeed, it’s even worse. Even after the intelligence reports, even after Clapper yesterday testified that Russia ran a “multifaceted influence campaign” that collected information about both Democrats and Republicans but only targeted the Democratic party, even after he emphasized that this is a bipartisan concern that will continue in the future, and said that if ever there was a “clarion call” to the threat Russian machinations pose to our democracy, “this is it,” the GOP senators except for Sasse declined to ask any questions about those threats. Instead, they (and their counterparts in the House) continued to double down to close ranks to protect Donald Trump from inquiry — drilling Yates and Clapper on leaks and unmasking, and going after Yates for refusing to enforce Trump’s unconstitutional, discriminatory Muslim ban. They brushed aside the jaw-dropping reality that Flynn was and is an unhinged, compromised, lying danger to the U.S. who should never have been anywhere near the presidency — and what the Trump team’s hiring and reliance on him says about Trump’s “judgment”; they ignored the facts that the White House was warned by both President Obama himself and Acting Director Yates that Flynn was a problem and that the White House apparently did nothing about Flynn until leaks forced Trump’s hand. They also appear to be indifferent to the shifting stories and trail of lies from the White House, from Trump to Spicer to Priebus, about when the White House knew what and why, when, and how Flynn was terminated. (In fairness, they are indifferent to the Trump team’s trail of lies about every subject.)
Remember too that the Republican senators’ response cannot be separated out from Trump’s repeated denials of Russian interference as “fake news” ; his repeated attacks on the U.S. intelligence agencies that concluded that Russian interference had occurred in an unprecedented manner and was successful; his tweets attempting to deflect public and Congressional concern from #TrumpRussia by lobbing incendiary, shocking, and fabricated accusations against President Obama and Susan Rice; or his pathetic, disgraceful tweets from before and after yesterday’s hearing. The GOP has hungrily devoured and then dutifully regurgitated up these talking points, trying to shift the inquiry and politicize it so that their base thinks the threat to our national security and the integrity of our elections is a joke or a lie, or a non-issue, and that “the problem” is not the Trump administration’s refusal to acknowledge or address the risks to our republic, or its actions in connection with Russia and Flynn and others, but, instead, the “problem” is “leaks.” The GOP does not care about the massive lies oozing out of this White House like diarrhea from a dysentery patient — they object to the truth being revealed, exposing Trump and making them look bad. And so trying to turn the leaks into the story (so that no more truth comes out) and to discredit Yates is their goal.
Is it fundamentally just naive to expect that the people who are sworn to uphold the Constitution and defend this nation will do so even if in the short-term that means not simply parroting the political lies of their party? I don’t think it is. The oath exists for a reason, and in my opinion, almost every one of these senators yesterday demonstrated a willingness to violate it. I had a hard time believing my own eyes and ears yesterday as I watched them not even pretend to make a record for posterity, for history, or even for the next election, that they are concerned about Russian interference in our government, or that they are concerned about the White House’s lies, or that they are concerned that the White House not only put Flynn in that role at all, but then kept him there, and apparently would have kept him there forever, had his lies not been exposed to the public. How can they not even try to project a concern for the basic integrity of our nation and our White House and the truth?
While there is an oath they swear to uphold, before that oath, there is also one nation that we all live in and that is supposed to be a democracy, a democracy that we share. How can we have come to the point where a sitting president and his party are willing to give a pass to an authoritarian, kleptocratic, murdering threat to Western Civilization’s attack on our democracy? This is insane. It seems clear that if this GOP Congress had been in office in 1973 and 1974, Nixon would have filled out his term. This is what I mean when I say the GOP is rotten to the core — selling out this country, our Constitution, our national security, and our governing and democratic norms for Trump and for themselves.
4. Don McGahn was warned by Yates on January 26, 2017 that Flynn was compromised. Sean Spicer’s prior statements contemporaneous with the reporting in late January and early/mid February indicate that McGahn discussed the issue with Trump that very day, Flynn was kept on for another 18 days. During that time his security clearance remained intact and he participated in multiple high-level meetings with Trump. Spicer’s claim that Trump’s confidence in Flynn was slowly eroded is flatly inconsistent with Flynn’s continued, uninterrupted role — his laughable claim that one of the reasons Trump lost confidence was that Flynn had requested a security clearance for his son. Let’s unpack that for a second. That request was reported in early December:
The timing makes it clear that Flynn’s security clearance request had nothing to do with Trump “losing confidence” in Flynn. And Trump and his team were of course well aware that Pence had gone on Face the Nation on January 15, 2017 to repeat both the White House’s and Flynn’s lies that there were “no contacts” between the Trump team and Russian officials during the campaign and that Flynn’s five phone calls to Kislyak on December 29, 2016 were “strictly coincidental.” The Trump team did not correct Pence or Flynn; they let those statements stand. All of which begs the question of whether the substance of Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak on December 29th were known to the Trump team at the time. Do we have any reason to believe that he went rogue? Is his behavior or the White House’s consistent with such a hypothesis? I don’t think so.
Consider that we also have no evidence that any internal review was undertaken of Flynn by McGahn or others after hearing from Yates, though it may well have been. But even if there were, there is no publicly available evidence supporting the White House’s claim that Trump’s confidence in Flynn supposedly eroded between January 26, 2017 and the day he was fired/resigned. Kellyanne Conway said on February 13, 2017 that Trump had “full confidence” in Flynn. He continued to attend meetings with Trump and to fully participate in his role as National Security Adviser; his security clearance was not revoked. In fact the only thing that appears to have changed between January 26, 2017 and February 14, 2017 is that there was public reporting exposing the fact that Flynn had lied to Pence and the world about his contacts with Russia and their contents.
This is a huge deal, because it it strongly suggests that Michael Flynn would be the National Security Adviser today but for the leaks exposing the truth. And that is a huger deal, because it leads to the conclusion that the Trump administration was willing to allow a compromised actor at risk of interference for or on behalf of the Russian government to continue to have the highest level of security clearance and to serve as the National Security Adviser. In other words, the Trump team was willing to put our national security at risk as long as no one else knew about it. And why, we might ask, is that? What drove that willingness to compromise U.S. national security? Not a single Republican senator was willing to ask that question or suggest an answer.
5. Trump’s tweets yesterday, today, and the many days before are not the communications of a leader, a president, or a statesman. They are not the communications of a person with any commitment to the integrity of our national security or our elections or our system of government. They are the tweets of a hack desperate to avoid truth and transparency, of a petty low-level con-man floundering over his head as he attempts to deflect and gaslight his way out of responsibility for his traitorous self-interest and failure to protect our country and its democratic institutions. It is staggering that a lowlife vulgarian so ignorant and so utterly unwilling and unable to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America bears the title of President. And yet, it is somehow even more staggering that though Trump’s violations and unfitness are laid bare, the GOP is there to meet him, to defend him over our country, to push his partisan and self-serving narratives, to prevent a serious, independent investigation, and to ignore the real risks to our security as they search for ways to attack all who expose him and to suppress the truth.
#TrumpRussia #SallyYatesIsAPatriot
P.S. Apart from the pain and disgust from seeing the Republican party sell out our country for the likes of Donald Trump, I felt elation and gratitude watching Sally Yates’s professionalism, integrity, poise, and patriotism. The fact that she is a woman who unflappably eviscerated the men who deployed tricks, rudeness, and condescension to attempt to discredit her only added to the joy and relief of witnessing her decency and commitment to justice and the rule of law in action. Three fantastic tweets capture my sentiments exactly:
