Republicans want to make Russia probe go away -- but they can't [View all]

[DonViejo]

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr hoped his press conference would quell GOP anxiety. Didn’t go well

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
10.05.2017•8:00 AM

Yesterday President Trump flew to Las Vegas to meet with victims and first responders to the massacre on Sunday night and didn't make a total fool of himself. As awful as the occasion was, it was actually his best day in quite some time. At the very least, he was undoubtedly happy to be out of Washington, where the big news of the day was that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had reportedly called him a "fucking moron" after a meeting last summer at the Pentagon, where the brass had to give their commander in chief remedial lessons on geography and elementary American history. Tillerson raced before the cameras to assure the nation that the president is "smart," but did not deny his previous remarks. Trump dismissed it all as fake news, but on some level he surely knows it wasn't.

Another unpleasant event, from Trump's point of view, unfolded Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where the Senate Intelligence Committee called a press conference to give a "progress report" on the Russia investigation. Politico reported that GOP agitation has been building over the fact that there are three separate investigations, and leaders have been leaning on the committee chairs to wrap it up. The article quoted a number of Trump loyalists complaining about Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell's lax discipline in failing to rein in congressional probes which they saw as hampering the president's ability to get things done. These Republicans believe the investigations offer Democrats platforms to raise questions that strike at the legitimacy of the 2016 election, which is absolutely true. This is, of course, because the investigations keep turning up new evidence that strikes at the legitimacy of the 2016 election.

Needless to say, this sort of complaint is pretty rich coming from the Republican Party, which spent years and many millions of dollars investigating the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, despite each one of those eight investigations turning up little evidence of anything nefarious. By way of comparison, there have only been seven investigations of terrorist attacks against Americans over the past 20 years and zero investigations into the numerous attacks on embassies over the same period. Yet from 2012 to 2015, five different committees held dramatic televised public hearings that were clearly designed to damage the reputation of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepared to run for president.

Recall House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy letting the cat out of the bag:

Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.

He couldn't have made their strategy any plainer.

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https://www.salon.com/2017/10/05/republicans-want-to-make-russia-probe-go-away-but-they-cant/