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Mike Conaway is the House Republican who’s been kind of sort of running the House Intelligence Committee investigation into Trump-Russia after Devin Nunes supposedly but not really recused himself. Sending staff to England to stalk Christopher Steele and writing the misleading Nunes Memo are strange ways of recusing yourself. It seems that Nunes’ ‘recusal’ has been entirely a thing of whimsy for him as he ‘unrecused and then recused himself again’ countless times.
In any case Mike Conaway who has at least nominally been running the investigation since May, 2017 had some pretty eyebrow raising comments yesterday on the Chuck Todd show. First he said that the Committee didn’t investigate collusion. OK then why did you put out a statement saying you found no evidence of it?
“Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) said Sunday the House Intelligence Committee was not tasked with investigating collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, despite the committee issuing a report last week stating it found no evidence of collusion in the 2016 election.”
“Our committee was not charged with answering the collusion idea,” Conaway said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
“So we really weren’t focused on that direction.”
Uh-ok, but then where does this talk of finding ‘no evidence of collusion’ come from?
A spokeswoman for Conaway said he “meant obstruction” rather than collusion.
“The scope of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia Investigation covered four parameters, including if Russian active measures included links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns, or any other U.S. person,” said Emily Hytha, a spokeswoman for Conaway. “As Mr. Conaway announced on Monday and has stated repeatedly, including on ‘Meet the Press,’ the Committee did not find evidence of collusion. We thoroughly investigated all four bipartisan parameters within our scope, and believe we have the information we need to present the American people with the facts we’ve uncovered.”
Ok, he said collusion but he meant obstruction. Makes sense. But let’s take Ms. Hytha’s word for it-she knows what her boss knows better than he does: they did so investigate collusion. If so, they didn’t do it very well, evidently:
Conaway on Sunday acknowledged the committee did not interview former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos and other key figures, because he didn’t want to overlap with special counsel Robert Mueller‘s criminal investigation.
“We’re trying to stay away from the Mueller investigation and not confuse that or hurt it one way or the other,” he said.
You didn’t interview Papadopoulos and yet you say there’s no evidence of collusion? That’s kind of like investigating Nicole’s murder without interviewing OJ Simpson. It was Papadopoulos’ revelations in front of Australia’s top diplomat that the Russians had thousands of emails damaging to Hillary Clinton that led to the beginning of the FBI”s Russia investigation.”
UPDATE: Though as John Schindler points out there previous to Alexander Downer reporting what the Coffee Boy said to the FBI there had been a lot of signals intelligence from both NSA and our allies.
End of UPDATE.
How can Conaway even begin to justify not speaking to Papadoupolos-or Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn? Trying to stay away from the Mueller investigation? Fine-then say that. Say you didn’t investigate the question of collusion adequately because of some-misplaced-concerns over overlapping with the Mueller investigation.
In truth this too is a canard. In Watergate you had the Special Counsel AND the Watergate Select Committee and in no way did the latter ‘confuse or hurt’ the former. But it was clear from the moment Mueller was appointed that the GOP would use that as an excuse to slow walk the investigation.
Now they compound not doing a thorough investigation-they didn’t speak to many important witnesses and didn’t follow up with many more-by making conclusions they have no right to make. Indeed, their investigation of collusion went as far as asking Trump associates if they colluded and when the answer is no saying ‘You see-there was no collusion.’
In truth, they never should have abdicated their roles in favor of Mueller as while his investigation is vitally important there’s also a vitally important role for Congress; indeed, at the end of the day, the issue of Trump’s possible impeachment is a political not a legal question-ie, for Congress not for Mueller.
When Chuck Todd pushed him on his failure to interview Papadopoulos this was Conaway’s answer:
CHUCK TODD:
Okay. If you didn’t interview George Papadopoulos, somebody who apparently is the person that triggered the investigation because he was bragging about potential access to damaging information on Hillary Clinton, if you didn’t interview him, just that one, and there’s other people you didn’t interview, how can you draw this conclusion–
REP. MICHAEL CONAWAY:
Well–
CHUCK TODD:
–definitively?
REP. MICHAEL CONAWAY:
–he got outside the opportunity for us to interview him when he was charged and is caught up in the Mueller investigation. We’re trying to stay away from the Mueller investigation and not confuse that or hurt it one way or the other. So that part of the timing – front. The other issue is we couldn’t feel a real good link between the Papadopoulos himself and his braggadociosness and the Trump campaign. He was kind of at the edge of the circumstances. And after he–
Ie, Conaway is taking Trump’s own claims that Papadopoulos was the ‘coffee boy’ or something. Sure-some coffee boy:
This weird thought-‘he was at the edge of circumstances’… I mean Don Segretti and G. Gordon Liddy were at the ‘edge of circumstances in the Nixon campaign.’
Trump had Papadopoulos meeting with foreign dignitaries after the election but he’s ‘at the edge of circumstances.’
Overall the GOP worries that they’ve ‘botched’ the rollout of this Russia report.
This is because besides the evidently baseless claim that they proved definitively ‘there was no collusion’ when they didn’t even look-like Schiff said what their report really says is they’d rather not know–they attempted to take compound it by claiming Russia didn’t actually want Hillary to lose and Herr Trump to win they just wanted to foster disruption.
“House Republicans are privately venting that they’ve fumbled the release of their own Russia probe report.”
“The blaring headline the GOP wanted from this week’s rollout was clear: After a year of searching, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee found no evidence that President Donald Trump or his associates aided Moscow’s scheme to interfere in the 2016 election but that the nation must still prepare for another assault from the Kremlin.”
“Instead, much of the focus has been on lawmakers’ startling conclusion that the nation’s intelligence agencies botched their analysis when they determined Russia wanted Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton.”
“The finding once again pitted the committee’s Republicans against the leaders of the intelligence community and led to a frenzy of news coverage that put members on the defensive. And rather than seizing an opportunity to highlight the Russian threat and undermine lingering questions about the Trump campaign’s Russian contacts, Republicans faced a political headache of their own making.”
“The muddled messaging was the subject of a closed-door meeting of committee Republicans on Wednesday. According to three sources briefed on the discussion, a frustrated Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) raised pointed concerns about why critiquing intelligence agencies was even mentioned at Monday’s rollout. The finding, after all, won’t be included in the committee’s official Russia report — it will be the subject of a second report issued later in the spring. But the decision to link it to the committee’s Russia findings scrambled the release.”
“Speaker Paul Ryan’s office also felt compelled to intervene as Republicans offered increasingly scattershot responses in interviews, with some more eager to criticize the agencies than others.”
I mean this is fair enough as far as it goes. Certainly they bit off a lot more than they needed to chew in questioning the IC’s assessment that Russia wanted to help Trump. And it was Conaway yet again who made the blunder-just like his blunder yesterday.
“The trouble began Monday evening, when Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), the House Intelligence Committee’s lead Russia investigator, rolled out an overview of the committee’s findings from its yearlong Russia probe. Conaway had been leading the effort since last April, when the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), stepped aside amid an ethics complaint. (The complaint was dismissed in December.)”
UPDATE 2.0: As it turns out the investigation of Nunes was much like the GOP’s fake Russia investigation-the ethics committee never even examined the relevant evidence-the intelligence he was accused of divulging.
“In addition to determining that the Trump campaign made no attempt to cooperate or conspire with the Russians, the committee faulted the Obama administration’s handling of the Russian operation, accused Russia of “a pattern” of attacks on American allies in Europe and described leaks from senior intelligence community officials to reporters.”
UPDATE 3.0 So they are criticizing Obama’s response but not Mitch McConnell who refused to cooperate with Obama’s response for partisan reasons…
We know all about how McConnell pre-election watered down Obama’s warning of Russian interference. McConnell was able to browbeat Obama into a watered down statement by threatening to accuse Obama of something that for Obama-great President though he was-was the equivalent of calling him a child molester: partisan.
End of UPDATE 3.0
“But those conclusions were quickly overshadowed by Conaway’s indication that the committee wouldn’t support the intelligence community’s unanimous “high confidence” finding that Russia favored a Trump victory in the election. The FBI, CIA and National Security Agency have stood by this finding repeatedly over the past 14 months, even after Trump’s appointees took the helm.”
But the bigger picture is that shutting down the investigation now-when they haven’t interviewed so many important witnesses is not defensible on its own terms.
And the process of the House GOP’s investigation has been all wrong too. It’s been totally behind closed doors. Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff reveals how the GOP thought that March 8, 2017, the day Comey addressed Congress and revealed the existence of the Russia investigation was a disaster. Why is this? Clearly because it embarrassed so-called ‘President Trump.’
This is why they have kept it behind closed doors-to save ‘President Trump’ any further embarrassment. But that’s not their role. We have the biggest investigation in the history of the Republic and all they care about is protecting so-called ‘President Trump’, Illegitimate ‘President Trump.’
Truly the party of treason, a party whose members are always Republicans first and Americans second.
Speaking of treason, NPR has a good piece on Devin Nunes:
What does Nunes know?
The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., enjoys access not only to a huge breadth of information from America’s spy agencies but also to some of their deepest secrets. He doesn’t need to rely on press reports.
At the same time, he is an ally of President Trump, a supporter of House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. — to whom he owes his chairmanship — and a politician with strong conservative views.
So when Nunes and his House intelligence committee concluded this week that there was “no evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential election, which Nunes was speaking: the intelligence insider or the party loyalist?”
The record clearly speaks for itself-Nunes has abused this great power of his-access to our most sensitive intelligence for the GOP not the country.
The chairman is in a position to know what the U.S. intelligence community knows about the Russia matter, beyond tittle-tattle in the newspapers and into the secret evidence including signals intelligence and the reports from human sources.”
Which means he’s in a position to lie.
And it would be political malpractice for him not to continue advocating for his own president in the way he has from the very earliest phase of the House committee’s investigation.
So it’s telling that, in this context, Nunes considers this moment opportune.
And then NPR puts it’s finger on why the GOP shutting down of the Russia investigation now when Mueller isn’t likely to be done this year is so premature and outrageous:
What does it all add up to? In clearing Trump, Nunes and the House intelligence committee are not only stating there is no such evidence today, but also that there never will be.”
Exactly. For all we know Nunes knows of hard evidence of collusion. Or maybe Mueller has it or will eventually come to it. Nunes and his Republican friends are arguing that somehow they can see the future with perfect foresight that there never will be.
In appreciating how wrongheaded such a claim is, consider that we didn’t have smoking gun of Nixon’s collusion with the South Vietnam to win the election in 1968 until a few years ago. It took almost 50 years for direct evidence in that case.
UPDATE 4.0: Actually it seems that NPR article actually bought the idea that Nunes could somehow have known in February of 2018 that not only was there ‘no evidence of collusion’ but there never would be. This was clearly false even then-does the author understand the nature of evidence-which includes circumstantial as well as direct evidence?
I had thought the author Phillip Ewing had made a good point-not realizing that he actually believed it was possible that Nunes could somehow know there would never be any evidence of collusion as such an idea was clearly false even then.
I assumed he regarded such an idea as self evidently absurd-as it is. With the unredacted Mueller Report out now there you can plainly see how absurd such an idea is.