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The House Republican Russia Report Is Nothing But a Hack Job

But will it be used as fuel to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller?


By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 27, 2018



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As if we needed more hilarity in our politics, the House Intelligence Committee—surely one of the most oxymoronic names ever to come slinking onto the main stage—on Friday released the majority report of its “investigation” into the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election and what connection to and/or involvement in it the Trump campaign might have had.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the Republican majority absolves the president* and his campaign of any involvement whatsoever.

Neither Patton nor Greg Louganis ever went into the tank so readily as Devin Nunes did. Tom Sawyer’s friends weren’t as good with whitewash. And, as is now customary, Nunes and his merry band of obfuscators found a whole herd of scapegoats with which to raise dust. From The New York Times:

They trained their fire more sharply on Democrats and other perceived opponents of Mr. Trump. Republicans criticized the Obama administration for a “slow and inconsistent” response to Russia’s active measures. They faulted the F.B.I. for its “largely inadequate” notification of victims of Russian hacking and for its surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, long a source of conservative complaints.



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The Republicans accused American intelligence agencies of failing to use “proper analytic tradecraft” in deducing in their January 2017 assessment President Vladimir V. Putin’s strategic objectives for the interference campaign.

The report does not specify what those intentions are, but an earlier version disputed that Mr. Putin had been working to harm Hillary Clinton and aid Mr. Trump’s campaign. And they admonished Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee for hiring Fusion GPS, a research firm, to investigate ties between Trump associates and Russia. The firm in turn hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy, who produced a salacious dossier outlining a conspiracy between the campaign and the Russians.

This is a farce and any honest person would recognize it as such. It is riddled with redactions, many of them curious. The indomitable Marcy Wheeler’s Twitter feed goes through the redactions, as well as explaining the context for them, in admirable detail. Wheeler is particularly fond of this passage:

We reviewed every piece of relevant evidence provided to IJS and interviewed ·every witness we assessed would substantively contribute to the agreed-upon bipartisan scope of the investigation. We acknowledge that Investigations by other committees, the Special Counsel, the media, or interest groups will continue and may find facts that were not readily accessible to the Committee or outside the scope of our investigation.

As Wheeler points out, “not readily accessible” likely translates from congressional weaselspeak into, “the questions we chose not to ask.”

This is pretty much the view of the Democratic minority on the committee, which issued its own rebuttal. Congressman Adam Schiff and his colleagues went to town on the majority’s conclusions. From Mother Jones:

“A majority of the report’s findings are misleading and unsupported by the facts and the investigative record. They have been crafted to advance a political narrative that exonerates the President, downplays Russia’s preference and support for then-candidate Trump, explains away repeated contacts by Trump associates with Russia-aligned actors, and seeks to shift suspicion towards President Trump’s political opponents and the prior administration… Despite repeated entreaties, the Majority refused follow-up document requests informed by new information and leads.

For instance, the Committee has not received from the Trump campaign and transition all correspondence to and from George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, and other key persons of interest, thereby making it impossible to determine whether the Committee has reviewed the complete universe of relevant correspondence.”

The hell you guys want? Can’t you read? That stuff is Not Readily Accessible.



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And, while joy appeared unrefined down at Camp Runamuck—the president* pronounced himself “honored” at the seven layers of whitewash the Republicans laid down for him—the incredibly inconvenient Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who attended the now-infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, was preparing to tell NBC that she was a Kremlin plant. From the NYT:

But newly released emails show that in at least one instance two years earlier, the lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, worked hand in glove with Russia’s chief legal office to thwart a Justice Department civil fraud case against a well-connected Russian firm.

Ms. Veselnitskaya also appears to have recanted her earlier denials of Russian government ties. During an interview to be broadcast Friday by NBC News, she acknowledged that she was not merely a private lawyer but a source of information for a top Kremlin official, Yuri Y. Chaika, the prosecutor general. “I am a lawyer, and I am an informant,” she said. “Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general.”

The previously undisclosed details about Ms. Veselnitskaya rekindle questions about who she was representing when she met with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and others at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the campaign.

The meeting, one focus of the special counsel investigation into Russia’s election interference, was organized after an intermediary promised that Ms. Veselnitskaya would deliver documents that would incriminate Mrs. Clinton.


So, no, you’ll forgive me if I decline to recognize Congressman Nunes’s little puppet show as dispositive of anything except the thoroughgoing hackery of the House Republican caucus.

However, the chortling and tweeting makes me wonder if the White House is delusional enough to use this report as an excuse to make a move on Robert Mueller, especially now that Mitch McConnell has said that he’s not going to schedule a vote on a bipartisan Mueller-protection bill that’s already been passed out of committee. I’d say firing Mueller wouldn’t make sense, but sense hasn’t been readily accessible for quite some time now

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