GOP CONGRESS SHATTERS CHECKS AND BALANCES OF OUR REPUBLIC

…..House Intel Chairman, Devin Nunes (R-CA)

 

Without assurances of secrecy, US intel info sources will start drying up.

 

What our fearless leader in the White House does, is not just his average 5½ lies–per-day that is so embarrassing, but it now appears that he has the Republican leadership in the US Congress also as a support group.  The White House will probably today, or soon, release a memo written by the Republican run House Intelligence Committee that used cherry-picked facts, and ignored others, that smears the FBI and the Justice Department.  All this, while potentially revealing intelligence sources and methods that the head of the FBI has said will do us all serious harm.

 

It is highly extraordinary for the FBI to make such a dire claim.  In addition, the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee has written a counter memo that shows where the GOP’s memo has stated false statements and it shows where serious breaches have been done by releasing this information.  But the Republicans on the committee brazenly voted that the Democrat’s memo could not be released.

 

But the serious violations don’t stop there.  The House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) also personally made further changes to the memo in question before it was released to the White House.  Yes, this is the sane Devin Nunes that had to recuse himself from other committee issues when he took it upon himself to break protocol and personally go to the White House on another issue to warn the president on what became a false event.

The Democratic response with their counter memo was a serious break from the committee’s nonpartisan tradition and it’s another troubling sign that House Republicans are willing to put the president’s political dictates ahead of the national interest.

 

Even during the most difficult of times, when Congress had seemingly lost the capacity to govern, and partisan storms raged across Capitol Hill (as is happening today), the whole intelligence committee remained largely insulated from the Republican’s increasingly self-destructive politics, but that is apparently no longer the case.

 

If you are scratching your head over why this is all happening right now, here is the reason.

 

The explanation for the Republicans’ abrupt departure from their nonpartisan tradition is the growing alarm over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. In a matter of months, the president’s first national security adviser and a foreign policy adviser have pleaded guilty to felony offenses, while his former campaign chairman and deputy campaign manager have also been indicted. As Mueller and his team move closer to the president and his inner circle, a sense of panic is occurring on the Hill. GOP members recognize that the probe threatens not only the president but also their majorities in Congress.

 

In response to the panic, they have drawn on the classic strategy of most criminal defense lawyers.  That is, when the evidence against a defendant is very strong, they put the whole government on trial. The personal Nunes memo is designed to do just that.  It does it by furthering conspiracy theories that senior officials within the FBI and the Justice Department were so biased against President Trump that they decided to poison the investigation. If it wasn’t clear enough that this was the goal, Chairman Nunes removed any and all doubt when he declared that the Justice Department and the FBI themselves were under investigation by their committee at the same hearing where the memo was ordered released.

As multiple investigations work to unearth the full truth, the president has lashed out with Nixonian approaches to the Justice Department, the FBI, and even the various congressional investigators and of course, the main-stream media.

 

However, unlike President Richard M. Nixon, who waged his Watergate fight without these kind of vocal allies, Trump not only has an entire media system like Fox & Friends dedicated to shielding him from accountability, but it also includes senior Republicans on the Hill who have cast aside their duty to uphold law and order, at no matter what the cost.

 

Devin Nunes may have wielded the committee gavel here, but the ultimate responsibility lies with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who lacked any courage and who had the power to stop him.

 

Speakerl Ryan, who has never served on any Intelligence Committee, obviously does not understand the central purpose of the intelligence committees, especially after the infamous Watergate trials.  The rules are as follows: In exchange for the intelligence community’s willingness to guard national secrets in a select group of committee members for the purposes of oversight, the committees and the congressional leadership must pledge to handle that information responsibly and without regard to politics.

 

That is not happening with the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.  They are beholded only to President Trump.

 

That contract has now been spectacularly broken by the creation of the partisan Nunes memo that misrepresents highly classified information that should never be made public. Intelligence agencies can no longer be confident that material they provide the House or Senate committees will not be repurposed and manipulated for reasons having nothing to do with national security.

 

As a result, the agencies will now be far more reluctant to share their secrets with the committees.  In addition, the sources of information that the agencies rely upon may start drying up, since they can no longer count on any secrecy. This is a grave cost for such a short-term political gain.

The highly obscure rule that the majority has relied upon would normally expect that a responsible president will consult with the agencies affected and reject any misleading and partisan declassification effort. But that is not anything we can expect from the current occupant of the Oval Office.

 

I am hoping that the president will have to eventually answer for his actions.

 

But it appears that there will be no avoiding congressional shattering of yet another norm of what the founding father’s expected from the checks and balances they designed for our democratic republic.

 

It’s very sad.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2018