The attorney general then sat back while the media deduced that the criminal investigation must have meant that Durham had found evidence of Russiagate-related misconduct. Barr, often shameless when it comes to publicity, quietly allows an investigation into Trump to be used to antagonize Trump’s perceived enemies. (The fate of that investigation remains a mystery.)
This deplorable episode is a remarkably perfect example of how scandal-ridden the Republican Party works. The right ascribes to its opponents, whether Democratic Party or hypothetical underground government, appalling corruption and elaborate conspiracies. Then, in the name of fighting back, it mimicked the tactics it accused its enemies of using.
For example, consider the behavior that led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden, as vice president, used the threat of withholding US loan guarantees to blackmail the Ukrainian government into making his personal bid. . Hoping to get Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to prove his lies, Trump attempted to use the threat of withholding American aid to… blackmail the Ukrainian government into doing his personal bidding. . In turn, the symmetry between accusations and counter-accusations fuels widespread skepticism about ever finding out the truth.
It is important to keep this in mind as we are about to see much more. Now that they have control of the House, Republicans have prioritized investigating their political opponents. McCarthy has stacked the Oversight Committee, the heart of the House’s investigative apparatus, with arsonists, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert. Furthermore, as Politico reported in a “field guideIn light of the upcoming Republican demands, McCarthy urged Republicans to treat every committee like an Oversight Committee, meaning every investigation, every time.
There will be investigations into Hunter Biden, and investigations into the origins of the pandemic. There is likely to be close scrutiny of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and Biden’s handling of classified documents. And, as my colleague David Firestone on the editorial board put it Over the weekend, “House Republicans are launching a new manhunt” for evidence that the FBI and other intelligence agencies have been “weaponized” against conservatives. .
