House of Cards in reverse — Congress trying to subvert the Executive branch — may be more fertile ground to unearth a Russian conspiracy than inside the Trump election campaign. Consider what this TV interview had to say about the Russians’ hacking strategy:
The interview, broadcast by the independent Russian TV station Rain, provides new insight into how the troll factory formerly known as the Internet Research Agency targeted U.S. audiences…. [Employees] were to stoke discontent about the U.S. government and the Obama administration in particular. “We had a goal to set up the Americans against their own government,” he says. “To cause unrest, cause discontent [and] lower [President] Obama’s rating.”
How is that different than what Mitch McConnell explicitly established as the goal of the Republican Congress the day after Obama was elected? How is it different than what Republicans in Congress did every day for the next eight years?
Robert Muller charged with looking for a Trump conspiracy with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. That’s really too narrow for what we ought to be looking into. As even Russian media have found, the goal was much more strategic than simply tactical: not just to interfere in one election, but to undermine Americans’ faith in their own government (the Obama administration in particular), and weaken their belief in American democracy as a force working in their own interest.
Is that not the Republican agenda? (Ever since Reagan, who famously began with “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”) And if so, why are we looking at Trump and his cadre alone, as the actors whose interests were most closely aligned with what the Russians were doing? Didn’t the Russians, in fact, learn their tactics directly from the Republicans in Congress, by example — and shouldn’t we be asking whether they acted independently, or if there was actual collusion between congressional Republican leadership and the Russians?
I know, there’s lots of glaring evidence of collusion by lame Trump actors, and not much yet by Republican congressional leadership. But one wonders what Mueller is discovering that may reach them. Their strategic motives were exactly aligned with the Russians (as the Rain article characterizes them) — whereas Trump’s were only tactically aligned.
Just sayin’.