64 Party of Treason: Paul Ryan Keeps it in the Family

Party of Treason

It’s not just Trump it’s the entire Republican party which has shown itself to be the party of treason. That is putting partisanship and its ideological agenda above the country itself-it’s national security and the very integrity of its democratic system of government.

Jonathan Chait had a good recent piece on how the GOP learned not to worry and love so called President Trump. 

Spoiler alert: it’s the tax cuts for the rich-and the backloaded tax hikes for everyone else down the road.

The GOP learned to love him once they were assured that all his talk about a huge infrastructure plan, a wealth tax, and ‘healthcare for everybody’ was just that-talk.

Now that they see his agenda fully mirrors their’s-rank plutocracy in economics and deeply reactionary on social policy-they have fully embraced ‘President Trump.’

Paul Ryan has been fully outed as someone who doesn’t care what Trump does on his own time with Putin so long as he gets to do record corporate tax cuts for the rich and privatize Medicare.

Trump infamously declared he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and get away with it: if Paul Ryan and his GOP co-conspirators-aka the family-were on the jury, he surely could.

The Washington Post:

“WHAT THIS is not is an indictment of our institutions, of our justice system,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Thursday about the now infamous “Nunes memo.” “It does not impugn the Mueller investigation or the deputy attorney general,” the speaker insisted. Is this cynicism or naivete?”

“Mr. Ryan bears full responsibility for the deterioration of congressional oversight of intelligence operations. Once a bipartisan responsibility that lawmakers treated soberly — as they still do in the Senate — oversight under Mr. Nunes has become another front in Mr. Trump’s assault on the law enforcement institutions investigating the president and his associates. House Republicans are poisoning the committee’s relationship with the intelligence community and distracting from real issues demanding attention.”

UPDATE: It’s not entirely clear that they have done such a great job on Russiagate in the Senate either-in the land of the blind-and Devin Nunes’ Cow-the one-eyed man is King.

Ryan clearly made his choice in siding with Nunes against the FBI and DOJ. He chose not national security and integrity but naked partisanship and his ideological commitments.

UPDATE:

Today is April 4, 2019.

I wrote this back on the last day of February, 2018-February 28, 2018. Since then Paul Ryan has left Congress and GOP and friends received hundreds of thousands of documents regarding Hillary Clinton as well as the Mueller investigation-while it was ongoing. Now Bill Barr thinks he can mollify the Dems with some blacked out redacted mess. It’s clear that the Mueller team and Barr define sensitive information pretty differently.

End of UPDATE:

In all the noise around the memo, it is easy to lose sight of the scary truth that a hostile foreign government attempted to influence the 2016 election and shows every intention of trying again this year. You’d think Mr. Nunes’s committee would be alarmed by this threat to American democracy. Instead, Mr. Nunes, with Mr. Ryan’s aid and comfort, is helping Mr. Trump impede an investigation into these very issues. It is sad to see the speaker allow the House to be tarnished in this way.

But then Ryan is the one who warned his GOP colleagues back in June 2016 to keep the truth about Trump and Russia in the family. 

At the end of the day you suspect that Ryan himself will be a person of interest for Mueller.

Louise Mensch, the American who became a Brit can quote from one of the greatest Brits ever-the great economist Maynard Keynes: first they laugh at you then they say you’ve said nothing new.

When Mensch had claimed  her sources indicated there could be a sealed indictment against the GOP itself this was laughed off as self evidently absurd.

Yet on December, 27 it was being reported that not just the Trump campaign but the GOP may be in Mueller’s crosshairs.

Natasha Bertrand:

“Special counsel Robert Mueller has begun to question Republican National Committee staffers about the party’s 2016 campaign data operation, which helped President Donald Trump’s campaign team target voters in critical swing states.”

“Two sources told Yahoo News that Mueller’s team is examining whether the joint RNC-Trump campaign data operation — which was directed on Trump’s side by Brad Parscale and managed by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — “was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate.”

For this reason alone, both Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer are persons of considerable interest as they were running the RNC before joining the Trump campaign.

Paul Ryan is also a person of interest as we know that Guccifer 2.0 also hacked DCCC files and that these were used against at least some Democratic Congressional candidates. 

“South Florida has long been a laboratory for some of the nation’s roughest politics, with techniques like phantom candidates created by political rivals to siphon off votes from their opponents, or so-called boleteras hired to illegally fill out stacks of absentee ballots on behalf of elderly or disabled voters.

“But there was never anything quite like the 2016 election campaign, when a handful of Democratic House candidates became targets of a Russian influence operation that made thousands of pages of documents stolen by hackers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington available to Florida reporters and bloggers.”

“It was like I was standing out there naked,” said Annette Taddeo, a Democrat who lost her primary race after secret campaign documents were made public. “I just can’t describe it any other way. Our entire internal strategy plan was made public, and suddenly all this material was out there and could be used against me.”

“The impact of the information released by the hackers on candidates like Ms. Taddeo in Florida and others in nearly a dozen House races around the country was largely lost in the focus on the hacking attacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But this untold story underscores the effect the Russian operation had on the American electoral system.”

So this is how far what long time Republican Steve Schmidt himself calls the GOP’s terminally tribal partisanship has taken them: that anything is acceptable to keep power for a party with a very unpopular ideological agenda.

It’s not just Trump-the party at a minimum chose to turn a blind eye to what was going on between Russia and Trump during the election.

And the question for Ryan is what did he know about the use of hacked DCCC information that was used against Democratic candidates?

Maybe this is why Ryan is considering getting out. It’s less that he thinks he can’t win his seat again in 2018 than that he worries what happens in 2019 with the quite likely prospect of a Democratic Congress with full subpoena power. The Dems will not only investigate Trump fully on Russia as well as many other myriad scandals like the daily violation of the Emoluments Clause.

UPDATE: Ryan is now out as of this coming January-perhaps he will have to testify before his own House now in Dem hands in the future?

They will also investigate how many Congressional races the Russians interfered in and with what American-GOP help.

There are a lot of stories about the GOP itself colluding or conspiring with Russian interests.

Then we have the stories of  growing connections between the NRA, Christian right groups and the Kremlin. 

Senator Ron Wyden is just beginning to ask questions about the NRA and Russia. 

But imagine the investigations if the Dems take the House back in 2019-which they’re likely to do?

UPDATE: Which they have now done. 

Adam Schiff was telling Rachel Maddow on Friday night that after the televised hearings with Comey on March 13, 2017-where Comey announced the investigation into Trump-Russia-the Republicans told Schiff that day was ‘an utter disaster.’

And it’s notable that we’ve had few televised hearings since. But why did the GOP consider that day such a disaster? Because they put party above country. They care more about-they care only about-partisan and ideological goals.

If they can have deep corporate tax cuts, cut 13 million people off Medicaid-as their fake tax reform bill also did-if they can privatize Medicare, if they can continue their assault on women’s reproductive rights and crack down on the civil rights of people of color then allowing Putin to literally be deciding American elections and setting US foreign policy is a small price to pay.

 

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