After working for almost six of the last fourteen months, Republicans members of the House Intelligence Committee, lead by Trump transition team executive Devin Nunes, took only minutes to reach a startling conclusion.
In their 73 interviews—many of them conducted three at a time and miles away from Washington so that no congressman need worry about hearing the answers—the House Committee didn’t talk to Paul Manafort, the chair of the Trump campaign. They didn’t talk to Rick Gates, the former number two person in the campaign and deputy chair of Trump’s transition team. They didn’t talk to Michael Flynn, who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters and led the “Lock her up” chant at the Republican Convention. They didn’t talk to George Papadopoulus, who represented Trump to multiple governments around the world.
Of those people that the committee did interview, several were allowed to pick and choose which questions they would answer or answer nothing at all. Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s closest assistant and press secretary during the campaign got through the day with a few sentences. Corey Lewandoski, who ran the campaign before Manafort came on stage, was also allowed to both select his own questions, and to refuse to answer any he didn’t like. Campaign CEO Steve Bannon not only got to write his own list of questions, but answered each of them with the single word “No.”
After processing the evidence they’ve collected, it took only minutes for Republicans on the committee to reach an astounding conclusion—Donald Trump never campaigned for president.
Instead, Trump appears to have arrived in office through immaculate election, the unanimous choice of the people, unswayed by social media bots, by false news stories, or by information stolen from American private citizens and paraded before the world by international criminals flaunting US law. That has to be the case. Because otherwise the House Intelligence Committee would be guilty of carefully stepping around the possibility of receiving any information that would validate the issues that they were supposedly there to investigate.
And the actions of the Nunes-led committee—failing to question the most central witnesses, allowing witnesses to claim a privilege that the House does not recognize, failing to subpoena documents and records, refusing to hold uncooperative witnesses in contempt, allowing witnesses to actually write their own list of questions, issuing partisan statements without even notifying the minority that a statement was in the works—all that looks bad. The only thing worse is the actions of Paul Ryan.
Because what Ryan has done is absolute proof that Republicans will never, ever take action against Trump.
When Devin Nunes first appeared to go definitely off the rails in 2017, during the “unmasking scandal” which Nunes created in conjunction with sources inside the White House, he stopped by—between frothing press conferences—to talk with Paul Ryan. At the time it seemed like Ryan, a long time friend of Nunes, might have urged his pal to slow down. This seemed even more likely when Nunes announced that he was unofficially recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and submitting to a hearing before the House ethics committee.
However, the ethics committee failed to hold against Nunes for his repeated lying and the roadblocks he threw into the House investigation—roadblocks that kept the committee from holding any hearings for a period of months. And Nunes never actually recused himself. Despite handing over the gavel, he was allowed to keep control of subpoenaing witnesses and documents, which allowed him to routinely turn down requests from Adam Schiff and other Democrats on the committee.
That included turning down requests for phone records and texts of those involved in the Trump campaign. It included blocking half the witnesses that Democrats had asked to call. And while Nunes was knee-capping the committee, Ryan backed him at every point. He continued to back him through the issue of the “release the memo” memo, which repeated Nunes’s earlier attempt to misdirect and misinform the public by selective editing and outright lying.
It got so bad that leaders from the Senate, including Republicans, came to Ryan in February looking for help over Nunes’s interference in the investigation—including Nunes leaking text messages of senators to Fox News. But Ryan turned them away. He made it clear that he was backing Nunes to the hilt.
On Monday, House Republicans announced that they were ending the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. They did this without informing the Democrats on the committee. Then they issued a one-page statement of a report that, supposedly, has not been written. This statement not only contradicted evidence that’s already become public through the Senate investigation and Robert Mueller’s indictments, it contradicted the intelligence agency assessment going back to before the election.
Ryan then followed this up by personally releasing additional information from the committee’s Republicans, making it absolutely clear that he backs them in their partisan destruction of the committee’s function, and in their absolute refusal to consider the evidence.
Devin Nunes has done his best at every step to give Trump ammunition he can use to thwart any real investigation into his actions. But Paul Ryan has gone further—he’s reassured Donald Trump that it doesn’t matter what anyone finds. He, and the Republicans in Congress, will not take action. No matter what.
Unless, of course, it’s against Hillary Clinton.