First of all, Senator Dianne Feinstein is a goddamn American hero.
For months, Republican senators have been refusing to release the full testimony of Fusion GPS’s founder Glenn Simpson. (Refresher: Fusion GPS is the company that hired UK spy Christopher Steele to investigate Donald Trump’s connection to Russia.) Senate Republicans not only blocked the release of Simpson’s testimony but invented the complete fictions that the dossier was a smear effort by the Clinton campaign and, a few days ago, that Steele had lied to the FBI. Tuesday, Feinstein finally just said “fuck it” and released the full transcript herself.
Now, normally, deciding to release testimony is the sort of thing that Congress as a whole would decide to do. However, it has become clear over the past few years that the Republican members of Congress have abandoned, not just bipartisanship, but all sense of decency. Democrats have up to this point mostly been their principled, reasoned, play-by-the-rules selves. (No, Democrats are not perfect. But if you can’t see the difference between the two parties right now you should wash the rancid red shit out of your eyes.) It’s taken us much longer than it should have, probably, but we’re waking up to the fact that our country, and maybe even the world, is at stake. It is hard to comprehend that the Republican leadership does not see that, but they don’t—perhaps because they are the engineers of this chaos. After all, this is the same GOP that flatly refused to confirm Merrick Garland with nearly a year left in Obama’s term. The same GOP that pushed through a horrible tax bill last month that even they didn’t have time to read. And yes, the same GOP that has enabled the worst president in American history. We must fight them in ways we normally would not. We must realize that what is usual and normal is not always what is right and ethical. Frankly, it’s high time we learned to play their game enough that we don’t cripple ourselves with decency. They don’t get to fight dirty for years and then cry because Democrats finally abandon Marquess of Queensberry Rules.
And about that: they haven’t cried. As I’m writing, it has been almost a full day since Feinstein released the transcript. Neither Senators Grassley or Graham—responsible for the bullshit story that Steele lied to the FBI—nor the Corruption Turtle, nor even Trump himself have whispered a single word about what Feinstein did. In fact, I can’t find one single Republican leader who’s addressed it thus far. Radio silence about something this huge is … well, it’s fucking creepy. Kinda makes me think they are properly terrified for their political futures. GOOD. Treasonous bastards.
When I use the word “huge,” by the way, that’s exactly what I mean. I think we’ll look back on the release of Simpson’s testimony as a watershed moment not only in the Russia/Trump investigation, but in American history. Let’s review some of the things we found out today (and props to the analysts whose work I used as bases for this post, as I haven’t had time to read the entire 10-hour 300-plus-pages testimony yet).
- Fusion GPS does not do hatchet jobs. They do not smear. They work for whoever pays them, and their pay is not contingent on what they find. They get paid for doing opposition research, regardless of the outcome.
- Fusion GPS understands Russian money laundering, and Steele, as an ex MI6 agent who specialized in Russian disinformation, knows when he’s being fed a line of Kremlin bullshit. Both Simpson and Steele were convinced that what they found was so egregious that Steele asked if he could take it to the FBI and Simpson agreed. (Later, Steele stopped cooperating with the FBI when he began to suspect he might be dealing with someone who had been compromised.)
- Trump has for years had serious ties to Russian organized crime and the Kremlin.
- Fusion GPS and Steele (they used other subcontractors too, not just Steele) uncovered evidence of digital espionage on Russia’s part, used to throw the 2016 presidential election to Trump.
- Trump’s campaign was complicit. They received a regular flow of information from the Kremlin. It’s also quite possible Trump was being blackmailed by the Russians.
- The Steele dossier did not trigger the FBI’s investigation (not that it would have mattered if it did). They’d already been investigating the Trump campaign for months and had a “voluntary” source—maybe George Papadopoulos, maybe someone else—on the Trump campaign.
- Simpson and Steele believed that at the time Steele was working with the FBI, then-Director James Comey may not have known of the Steele dossier. (Although … why would FBI agents have kept that information from their director? That’s sketchy as fuck.)
- And not to bury the lede, but Paul Manafort’s notes from the infamous June 9, 2016, meeting with the Russians at at Trump Tower say, in part, “active sponsors of the RNC.” It’s hard to say exactly what that means—are the Russians active sponsors of the Republican National Convention? was that the plan?—but it is suggestive AF of corruption that goes to the core of the Republican Party.
This is astonishing, and the Republican Senate leadership has known about it for months. They have known that our presidential election was purposely compromised, and they not only suppressed that knowledge, they tried to introduce lies to counteract it. They are traitors. There is everything to suggest that the entire goddamn Republican party at the national level is lousy with treason.
Time to rout the bastards, starting with Trump.
