Donald Trump and House Republicans are looking for one potential “October surprise” by forcing the Department of Justice and FBI to pony up a stack of unredacted documents and texts from which alt-Reich sites can generate fresh conspiracy theories. But they also have another iron in the CT fire: A last minute parade of James Comey, Loretta Lynch, and Sally Yates all propped in front of cameras so Republicans can take turns yelling at them about things they’ve already investigated endlessly.
House Republicans closed their “investigation” into connections between the Trump campaign at the beginning of March and got on with issuing a report saying that Trump had done nothing wrong. They did so over the objection of every Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, without issuing a single subpoena for documents, and with more than thirty potential witnesses still waiting to be interviewed. With that task out of the way, Republicans moved directly into launching three new investigations into the FBI and Hillary Clinton’s email. Those investigations were in addition to an already existing House Judiciary Committee investigation into … the FBI and Hillary Clinton’s email. And after a year of generating nothing, that Judiciary Committee is, just coincidentally, preparing to fill the pre-election TV with some big name grillings.
As Politico reports, Judiciary chair Bob Goodlatte and House Oversight Committee chair Trey Gowdy have issued requests for former FBI director Comey, former attorney general Lynch, and former deputy attorney general Yates to present themselves before the inquisition “as quickly as possible.” These headliners are just part of a larger group of invitations that have gone out in the last days.
It’s a move meant to guarantee that the final weeks before the midterms are chock full of Republicans attacking Comey, Lynch, and Yates for supposedly being too soft on Clinton and hiding a “deep state” conspiracy to stop Donald Trump. Viewers can expect to hear many questions about former agent Peter Strzok’s “insurance policy,” about the conversation between Lynch and Bill Clinton, about Yates’s actions in blocking Trump’s Muslim ban … and in general anything that would allow websites on the right to generate R, S, T, U, and V-Anon.
Politico also suggests that the investigation might wrap up in the next three weeks, allowing Republicans to rush out “findings ahead of the 2018 congressional elections.”
Democrats were not consulted in either the timing or the names involved in issuing these invitations. Which isn’t surprising. Republicans blocked every single request that Democrats made to subpoena witnesses for the Russia investigation, and quashed every subpoena for financial or other documents that could have assisted the investigation. In this case, Republicans didn’t just bypass Democrats in issuing the invitations—they also neglected to mention that they had been sent, even though the invitations were issued not just in the name of the Republicans, but as if they came from the full committee.
No comments: