While Washington and the rest of the country were talking about the revelations from F.B.I. Director James Comey’s testimony yesterday and what was clearly a very bad day for the still-young Trump Presidency, Republicans were trying to change the subject:
WASHINGTON — The headline from Capitol Hill on Monday was bracing: confirmation of a criminal investigation into connections between associates of a sitting president and Russian operatives during a presidential election.
But the response from Republicans was almost as striking: During hours of testimony in which James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, acknowledged the inquiry, they shrugged off its implications and instead offered a coordinated effort to defend President Trump by demanding a focus on leaks to news organizations.
Throughout the 5½-hour hearing before the House Intelligence Committee, as Democrats tried to highlight the criminal investigation, Republicans demanded a renewed focus on how its existence was revealed in news reports months ago.
When Democrats raised the issue of Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of wiretapping him — and Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. had “no information that supports those tweets” — Republicans railed against leaks.
When Democrats pressed Mr. Comey on evidence of coordination between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian operatives, Republicans questioned the F.B.I. director about how the names of those associates became public in news reports.
When Democrats pressed Mr. Comey on evidence of coordination between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian operatives, Republicans questioned the F.B.I. director about how the names of those associates became public in news reports.
The political strategy appears clear: Republicans are betting that they can deflect attention from the investigation into the president’s campaign advisers by insisting that more needs to be done to prevent the leaking of classified material.
Again and again on Monday, the president’s allies urged Mr. Comey and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to answer for the illegal dissemination of information to reporters.
In one remarkable back and forth, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, insinuated that several top Obama administration officials — including John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, and Benjamin J. Rhodes, the former deputy national security adviser — might have been the source of leaks to news organizations.
“One thing you and I agree on is the felonious dissemination of classified material most definitely is a crime,” Mr. Gowdy, whose own Benghazi investigation was known as a porous source of information to reporters, told Mr. Comey, who repeatedly refused to say that he was even investigating the release of classified information.
“I can’t say because I don’t want to confirm that that was classified information,” Mr. Comey said.
Whether the Republican approach works may depend on the outcome of the investigation itself, which remains shrouded in secrecy and is unlikely to be fully resolved within months or even years. That may lead to more leaks, and to a continuing effort by the president’s defenders to demand that they stop.
At one point in the hearing, Mr. Comey noted that leaks of sensitive government information have bedeviled the nation’s leaders since George Washington’s time, though he conceded that leakers have been “unusually active” in recent months.
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The effort to change the subject began with Mr. Trump, who said on Twitter early Monday that the “real story” is the “leaking of Classified information.” Later, he asked: “What about all of the contact with the Clinton campaign and the Russians?”
At the White House, Sean Spicer, the press secretary, returned to the subject of leaks again and again during his daily briefing for reporters, echoing the Republican lawmakers from the presidential podium.
Mr. Spicer railed against the “illegal leak” of the names of some of Mr. Trump’s associates under investigation. And he insisted that news organizations are refusing to cover the real story from Monday’s hearing: the need for the federal government to stop national security leaks.
Mr. Spicer also evaded questions about Mr. Trump’s associates by repeatedly returning to what he said were Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russia, even though Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign was hurt by Russian operatives’ hacking.
Mr. Spicer accused journalists of ignoring stories alleging that the Democratic National Committee had not provided the F.B.I. access to its hacked servers, a claim Democratic officials deny. Mr. Comey said Monday that the investigators got the information they needed to investigate the hack.
“Why? What were they hiding? What were they concerned of?” Mr. Spicer said. In confusing, rapid-fire fashion, Mr. Spicer noted accusations about “donations that the Clintons received from Russians” and decisions by Mrs. Clinton to sell “tremendous amounts of uranium” to Russia.
“Where’s the concern about their efforts on the Hillary Clinton thing?” Mr. Spicer said.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. Attempting to change the subject, or to focus on something other than the subject at hand in a Congressional hearing, is a time-honored tradition on both sides of the aisle. Republicans did it during the Iran-Contra hearing, Democrats did it at various times during the Clinton Administration and at hearings on issues such as the Fast & Furious investigation, the investigation into IRS targeting of conservative groups and, of course, the attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, and now we have Republicans doing it again with regard to this new investigation. To a large degree, it’s a reflection of the defensiveness that comes into play when one operates from the perspective of partisan politics, of course, since there’s always a fear that efforts to investigate an Administration of their own party will damage the party as a whole. Additionally, it is often the case that the issues that the party seeking to divert attention from the main focus of an investigation ends up raising legitimate issues. This is certainly true here, where several Republicans on the Intelligence Committee sought to probe Director Comey on the extent to which the ongoing investigation includes investigation of the leaks of information that may or may not have been classified to the media. This is an important issue that deserves to be investigated if only because leaking classified information is against the law, often for very good reasons that involve issues of national security and matters of life and death. If people broke the law in providing the media with information that should have been classified then they ought to be charged with the appropriate crime(s) and given their day in Court. To that extent, I suppose, the Republican effort to focus yesterday’s questions on leaks was appropriate. At the same time, though, it entirely missed the point of why the hearings were taking place and the serious nature of the allegations that the F.B.I. is investigating.
Gary Kasparov, the Russian chess master and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin who currently lives in the United States with his wife and children, put it quite succinctly on Twitter:
The house is on fire, Trump is running around with a box of matches, and the GOP demands to know who called the fire department.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 20, 2017
As I said, the issue of leaks of classified information is an important one that ought to be investigated, if not primarily because of the role it has played in this case but the extent to which such leaks can compromise national security and American national interests and place the lives of Americans, both military and civilian, in jeopardy. At the same time, though, Republicans in yesterday’s hearing were clearly guilty of the blindest kind of partisanship there can be in their persistent efforts to simultaneously defend the Trump Administration and divert attention from the serious allegations that have been raised regarding Russian efforts to influence our Presidential election and, now, the rather ominous suggestion of links between multiple persons associated with the Trump campaign and Russian business and government interests. These are the same Republicans who spent the better part of Barack Obama’s Presidency attacking the White House for not being strong enough in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressiveness, confrontational style, and belligerence toward the United States, Europe, and his immediate neighbors. They’re the same Republicans who, in 2012, were cheering Mitt Romney on when he called Russia the biggest geopolitical foe that the United States faced at the time. Now, here we sit with apparent evidence that the Russian government was seeking to influence the outcome of a Presidential election and that several top people on the campaign of one of the two major-party candidates had what are at the very least questionable ties with Russian officials and Russian oligarchs close to the Putin government. If the parties were reversed, the GOP would no doubt be on the front lines demanding an investigation. Instead, they are seeking to divert attention away from the real issues of concern and, as Dana Milbank notes, make sure that they stay in line with what the Trump Administration is saying:
The disheartening part was that most Republicans on the panel, which is supposed to investigate Trump, instead slavishly echoed his excuses.
Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) underscored that there was no “evidence that Russia cyber actors changed vote tallies.” (There was also no allegation that they had.) He also pronounced himself “extremely concerned about the widespread illegal leaks” (much more so than the potentially illegal actions that the leaks exposed).
Reading from Trump’s cue card, Nunes asked Comey to regard as “serious” the alleged Clinton campaign ties to Russia. In one exchange that sounded more sandbox than hearing room, Nunes asserted that “it’s ridiculous for anyone to say that the Russians prefer Republicans over Democrats.” The chairman urged Comey to tell his investigators not to believe “that somehow the Republican Party watered down its platform” on Russia.
Rep. Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.) pronounced himself concerned about the “unmasking of Gen. Flynn’s identity,” which denied him “the constitutional protections that we all enjoy.” (The “unmasking” of the former Trump national security adviser was in the service of demonstrating that he spoke falsely about his contacts with Russia.)
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who led a multiyear Benghazi investigation packed with innuendo and damaging leaks, repeatedly denounced the “felonious dissemination” of secrets, supposedly by the Obama administration, and the “hearsay” that is impugning the Trump team.
(…)
The chairman seemed more concerned about the political threat. Nunes told Comey flatly that “we don’t have any evidence” of wrongdoing by Trump and his associates and asked the FBI director to hurry the investigation. “There is a big gray cloud that you have put over people who have very important work to do to lead this country,” Nunes said.
But the FBI director didn’t put the cloud there. The Russians did. And if Nunes would consider country before party, he’d recognize that the cloud isn’t over Trump’s White House; it’s over all of us.
Milbank is correct, of course, and if Republicans don’t want to get caught up in the whirlwind they’ll stop acting like slavish defenders of a questionable President and start doing their jobs.
