On Monday, along strict party lines, the House Intelligence Committee voted to release the Nunes Memo — a collection of Republican talking points that the Department of Justice has warned is “reckless” and a tremendous risk to America’s national security — with all Republican members voting in favor and all Democrats voting against it.
The panel also voted along party lines to suppress a counterpart memo penned by Democrats that seeks to mitigate the damage that will be caused by the release of the Nunes Memo, should Donald Trump elect to declassify the contents and release it to the public in contradiction to the advice of his lawyers, advisers, and the Justice Department.
This action is part of an ongoing effort to undermine the special counsel investigation into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and the interference in the 2016 presidential election carried out by the hostile foreign power. At this point, there is no alternative but to conclude that many, if not all, of the Republicans on the Committee are complicit in whatever it is Trump does not want discovered by Robert Mueller and his legal team.
Legal scholars are now calling this an analog of Richard Nixon’s fabled “Saturday Night Massacre,” which resulted in the job turnover of multiple top officials in the Department of Justice after the president ordered the firing of the man investigating the Watergate scandal when they resigned in protest.
The current crop of Republicans have taken it a step further: They have now opened a sham investigation of the FBI and the DOJ. Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee refused to allow intelligence officials to come brief them on the national security risks of releasing the Nunes Memo, essentially putting their fingers in their ears about just how dangerous it is to America’s security for them to continue down this path.
All of this is being done in the service of a president who has now been proven to have committed obstruction of justice.
This is not hyperbole, this is treason.
Featured image via Opposition Report Gallery
