On Donald Trump, Devin Nunes & the GOP’s ‘release the memo’ dirty trick
January 30, 2018I’m not even going to attempt to untangle all of the different threads, theories, conspiracies and shenanigans in this story. This has all been a long time coming, and we’re really only halfway through – there’s so much more to come, I’m sure. Suffice to say that Congressional Republicans are not content to sell their souls to their billionaire donors – they are also selling their souls to Russia, and double-downing on anything they can do or say to help protect their unhinged orange daddy in the White House. Devin Nunes wrote a memo, and Russian bots and Deplorables were screaming “release the memo” for weeks because that was the f–king point.
Now we know what this whole “release the memo” was about: it was about Congressional Republicans doing the most to kneecap the Justice Department, the FBI and Robert Mueller’s investigation. The whole point of Nunes’ memo was to create the space for a domino-effect chain reaction of firings and resignations in the FBI and DOJ, which would give Donald Trump the space to eventually fire Robert Mueller and shut down the special counsel’s investigation into Trump-Russia. Here’s some of the sh-t that’s happened in just the past three days:
One resignation. Andrew McCabe, the FBI Deputy Director, is stepping down after being pressured to do so by FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was facing pressure from the White House. Trump believes that the FBI should behave his personal police force, and an FBI bureaucrat who disagreed with that purpose is now leaving the FBI.
McCabe was bullied by Trump. McCabe was briefly the acting FBI Director after Trump fired James Comey, and Trump attacked McCabe personally, and called his wife a “loser” and demanded to know who McCabe voted for in the 2016 election (which is against the law). Trump also took issue with McCabe allowing James Comey to take an FBI plane home to DC after Trump fired him (when Comey was in LA).
Trump’s temper tantrum. Trump apparently threw a massive hissy fit on the plane ride home from Davos last week when he learned that Associate Attorney General Stephen Boyd had warned that releasing Nunes’ memo would be “extraordinarily reckless.” Trump had not read the memo at that point, he was just told that the memo was “good for him” and the whole point of the memo was to discredit the FBI and DOJ.
What’s in this fakakta memo anyway? Congressional Republicans authorized the release of the Nunes memo yesterday, which means there’s a five-day period where the White House reviews the memo and decides whether to declassify it, blah. Apparently, the memo is basically about how Rod Rosenstein at the FBI authorized an extension on surveillance on Carter Page, a Trump campaign employee who was one of Russia’s useful idiots inside the campaign. The memo also claims that the whole Mueller investigation and FBI investigation is based on the Steele dossier, which the GOP has been trying to discredit for a year… even though most of the central claims in the dossier are true. The Nunes memo is basically a GOP dirty trick, writ large, to obfuscate what’s provable and verifiable and lump everything together in a tangled mess.
In any case, it’s a victory for the GOP and the Deplorables that we’re even talking about this and debating it. Democrats are like, “the GOP is going to be sorry they’ve worked to discredit the DOJ and FBI in the long-term,” but really… the Republican party isn’t going to be sorry about anything. They’ve gone all-in with Trump and Russia. We’re f–king doomed. Oh, and the State of the Union is tonight. That should be a f–king trainwreck.
Photos courtesy of Getty.