Alice Ollstein contributed reporting.
The “nothing to see here” mentality that has dominated congressional Republicans’ approach to President Trump’s growing pile of scandals finally cracked Tuesday night.
With the new allegation that Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey to tamp down the Russia investigation, the House GOP is now making at least a public showing of exercising its oversight responsibilities.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) announced Tuesday evening that he was requesting documents from the FBI related to the Comey allegations, while House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) stressed that Congress’ “job is to get the facts and t0 be sober about doing that.”
“Look, there has been a lot of reporting lately. I think that requires close examination,” Ryan said at a press conference Wednesday morning.
The House leadership’s acknowledgment that deeper digging was necessary – though how much and how aggressively remains to be seen – comes after months of turning a blind eye to other questions of inappropriate behavior raised about the Trump administration at the outset of his presidency.
There are signs that Republicans aren’t being totally earnest in their freshly-minted crusade for more information. Chaffetz’s letter to the FBI requests Comey memos not just for the first few months of the Trump administration but dating all the way back to the beginning of the Obama presidency in 2009.
GOP lawmakers are still insistent that they will stay focused on their agenda of repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, even as a drip-drip-drip of leaks about Trump’s handling of Comey’s firing continues. But now, there is potential for a paper trail – in the form of memos Comey was said to have written about his conversations with Trump – to be obtained and analyzed.
“The Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman has requested the memo in question, and I am actually interested in the entire compendium of Comey memos. I think that might be something of interest to the Congress,” Rep, Michael Burgess (R-TX) said Wednesday morning.
Coming out of their regular House GOP conference meeting, Republicans mostly ducked questions from reporters about the potential that Trump engaged in obstruction of justice in trying to quash the Russia probe. Wednesday is their first full day back after Trump’s abrupt firing of Comey last week, and the reports since then that Comey wrote a memo detailing a February request from the President to lay off of his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
A few GOP members were willing to pretzel-twist themselves into a defense of Trump, but some were more circumspect with their desire to see a fact-finding process play out.
“I’m a process guy. I believe that there are processes that are available to us, organic to us, in both the House and the Senate, and I believe that we need to let those processes unfold,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-AK) told reporters, adding that lawmakers needed to have a “Joe Friday mentality”
“Just the facts, and it will be the facts that will allow us to go from that point forward should there be a necessity to move in another direction,” he said.
More than a few GOP members said that they would like Comey to publicly testify, in addition to calling for the release of the memo at the center of the latest reports.
“If he’s got a charge to make, he needs to make it,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said. But he, like most Republicans, was not ready to join Democrats in their call for a special prosecutor or select committee to intervene.
“Until you have a charge of criminal activity – and I would certainly consider a charge by the former director of the FBI a credible charge – but until that’s made, you don’t really have anything to justify a special prosecutor,’ Cole said.
One of the few Republicans who has called for a special prosecutor, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), took the extra step of floating the possibility of impeachment Wednesday.
“If the allegations are true, yes,” he said, when asked if what the Comey memo detailed was grounds for impeachment.
According to members, the details of the Trump allegations weren’t discussed in the conference meeting, but rather, it was broadly acknowledged that steps were being taken to look into them and they should refrain from speculating.
“The Speaker stressed that we still had oversight responsibilities no matter who’s in the White House and that we’re going to fully perform those oversight responsibilities,” Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) said.
Ryan looked like he was having a bleach enema the whole time he was talking.
“Chaffetz’s letter to the FBI requests Comey memos not just for the first few months of the Trump administration but dating all the way back to the beginning of the Obama presidency in 2009.”
He’ll look for any morsel he can find to distract from Trump and refocus the investigation on Obama and HRC. For two seconds I thought maybe Chaffetz was finally going to do the right thing – but no. He’s an irredeemably dishonest GOP hack. Hope his foot gets gangrene.
Faith and begorrah, the Irish undertaker’s talking and isn’t it music to our ears.
I’ve had it. Congressional Republicans will do anything and everything to deflect this on to Obama and Clinton all the while letting Trump decimate our Republic for his and their own profit. Fuck them all! Traitors!!
When I saw Trump laughing with the Russians, including the spy Kislyak, in the Oval Office I was deeply offended.
And then I wondered why the Russians would release that photo if they saw any more usefulness left in Trump. The photo certainly seemed to leave him twisting in the wind, as they continued to spin the rest of us with the other claw.
It seems to me there are only three reasons why the Russians would have their photographer release that photo in the current geopolitical context:
1.Trump and his Russians colluders believe that their control over the U.S. is now so well in hand that they can be brazen about it. They believe the rest of us cannot reverse a surging incoming tide.
2.The Russians were letting Trump know that he himself is a helpless puppet of theirs, making him squirm, forcing him to do more of their bidding or face disclosure and destruction of his identity solely based on dominance and personal wealth.
3.Trump is/has always been a little toy for them and a useful tool to disrupt our democracy, deepening mistrust and paranoia among us, that has now become toy and tool no longer needed
All of this should frighten and mobilize us against a truly existential threat.