David Corn: How the GOP Pulled Me Into Its War on the FBI

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/how-the-gop-pulled-me-into-its-war-on-the-fbi/

How the GOP Pulled Me Into Its War on the FBI
Inside the conspiracy of dunces.

David Corn
March/April 2018 Issue


It was a Google Alert that notified me I was part of what was then the latest Republican conspiracy theory.

The message, in mid-January, pointed me to a column by Rep. Jim Jordan, a very conservative Republican from a very Republican district in Ohio, posted on the very conservative site Newsmax. Jordan, who was an assistant wrestling coach before entering politics, had drawn up a list of “18 top questions to be answered about Russia and the FBI.” I was Question No. 16.

In his introduction to this list, Jordan noted, “The American people deserve to know the extent of Russian interference into our free elections.” Yet for weeks, Jordan had been one of the leading Republicans decrying the investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal led by special counsel Robert Mueller. His 18 questions contained not one query about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 election, nor did they consider any of the multiple interactions between the Trump campaign and Russians.

Jordan’s main focus was a very different claim: that the FBI had secretly plotted to keep Donald Trump from winning. It was a manifestation of what has become the dominant line of attack as conservatives seek to torpedo the Trump-Russia investigation.

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Republicans, driven by short-term political self-interest and a desire to insulate Trump from whatever Mueller finds, have refused to come to terms with the main point of the Russia scandal: The United States is the ongoing target of sophisticated and extensive information warfare, one that already affected a presidential campaign. Yet the GOP crusaders have actively impeded a clear public discussion of what happened in 2016—and, more important, how future assaults could be prevented. In early 2017, the US intelligence community concluded that one goal of Putin’s operation against the United States was to sow chaos and discord. And that’s exactly what Trump, Jordan, and the others have been doing too. They have joined Putin in that fight.



The forthcoming book from David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, will be released on March 20.