Dear Republicans: About a special prosecutor . . . - By Jennifer Rubin
Dear Republicans: About a special prosecutor . . .
By Jennifer Rubin March 3 at 1:19 PM
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Until now, Republicans lawmakers have uniformly opposed a special prosecutor, remembering the drawn out investigations of the George W. Bush administration by Patrick Fitzgerald. Their reflexive reaction is to circle the wagons around the White House as Democrats insist only a special prosecutor can get to the bottom of this and assure the American people if President Trump or his aides have been compromised in some fashion. Republicans, for their own good, should stop protesting. They should be anxious to shove the entire thing off their plates and into the hands of a third party.
The facts are going to come dribbling out week after week, it seems, with GOP members forced to comment on each revelation. We learned this week that the repeated statements insisting the Trump campaign had no contacts with Russian officials were patently false. USA Today counted up 20 such denials, but news reports confirming lots of contacts between members of Trump’s inner circle and the Russians have surfaced. Dead stop. That in and of itself should suggest the public and Congress have been misled. Why has the Trump team gone to pains to conceal, deny and distance themselves from such associations?
By concealing contacts — ones the Russians certainly know about — the Trump team may have already made themselves vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Moreover, even if the communications concerned innocuous chit chat about the campaign (“Hillary Clinton sure is vulnerable to the FBI,” “Clinton’s emails must have something in them,” etc.), those may have led Russia to weaponize and leak (via WikiLeaks) harmful information at just the right time. In any event, the Russians clearly thought those communications were worthwhile.
And we have not yet gotten to possible financial ties. What if those business connections are significant, more than what the president has acknowledged (zero)? We already know both Michael Flynn and Donald Trump Jr. were paid handsomely for speeches by Russians or through their allies. Donald Jr. has boasted about Russian money coursing through the company.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/03/03/dear-republicans-about-a-special-prosecutor/?utm_term=.d034fb209e0f&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
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