(31 min) The Supreme Court is engaging in willful blindness by ignoring what the President says and paying attention only to what his lawyers are saying in arguments tailored specifically to
McConnell will go down in history as one of the primary villains because he
- blocked Merrick Garland
- blocked Obama from a pre-election warning
- enables Trump
Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.
Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.
McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment. After the election, Trump chose McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as his nominee for transportation secretary.
Some Clinton supporters saw the White House’s reluctance to act without bipartisan support as further evidence of an excessive caution in facing adversaries.
Russiagate Is Far Wider Than Trump and His Inner Circle
as the Post reported, when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was informed of Russian interference in September 2016 in a meeting with President Obama and other senior officials, he threatened to cast any public announcement of the threat as partisan politics. It’s not a stretch to say McConnell deliberately undermined national security for partisan advantage, a decision that has paid off with the signing of a massive tax cut for the wealthy and the looming establishment of a durable right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.
.. In other words, Russiagate isn’t just the narrow story of a few corrupt officials. It isn’t even the story of a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt political party, the one currently holding all the levers of power in Washington.
.. Butina is a colorful example of an increasingly common phenomenon in Washington: foreign nationals, not only from Russia but from dozens of other countries, who blur the line between lobbying and spying until it’s imperceptible.
This is what the evisceration of campaign-finance laws has yielded: a capital where American corporations and foreign governments see every official as being for sale.
..
Mueller, who knows more than anyone in the media about the extent of the Russiagate scandal and never leaks, isn’t telling us that Trump colluded and obstructed justice—
we already know that, because we literally saw Trump request on camera, in the summer of 2016, that Russia hack the Clinton campaign,
just as we later saw him bluntly admit to the world that he fired James Comey to end the Russia investigation.
.. we are being told something much more frightening: that Russiagate doesn’t end with Trump and his inner circle, that some members of Congress may be implicated
.. Republican leadership therefore has a personal stake in preventing anyone beyond Manafort and a few other flunkies from being held accountable.