https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/pl ... 9bbc1dd87f
THE MORNING PLUM:
This morning, Sen. Ben Cardin (Md.) — the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee — put out a report that offers a remarkable indictment of President Trump’s abdication of his responsibility to protect and defend our free and fair elections.
Republicans on the committee didn’t sign on to the report. This makes it more likely that it will be seen as a partisan document. Indeed, the desire to make that happen was likely the whole reason Republicans didn’t sign on to it.
But here’s the thing: We already know from independent reporting that the basic story told in the report is accurate and true.
The report offers an extensive look at what it calls Vladimir Putin’s “asymmetric assault on democracy” in multiple countries, and its “implications for U.S. national security.” For our purposes, what is notable is the report’s criticism of Trump’s failure to take steps to fortify our elections against future Russian attacks, which is pointed and detailed:
Despite the clear assaults on our democracy and our allies in Europe, the U.S. government still does not have a coherent, comprehensive, and coordinated approach to the Kremlin’s malign influence operations, either abroad or at home. … the lack of presidential leadership in addressing the threat Putin poses has hampered a strong U.S. response. …
While many mid-level and some senior-level officials throughout the State Department and U.S. government are cognizant of the threat posed by Mr. Putin’s asymmetric arsenal, the U.S. President continues to deny that any such threat exists, creating a leadership vacuum in our own government and among our European partners and allies.
The report concludes that Trump “has been negligent in acknowledging and responding” to the threat of future election sabotage and calls on him to “launch a national response” to that threat. This includes establishing a coordinated inter-agency response to the threat; and presenting to Congress a “comprehensive national strategy” to deal with it.
The Associated Press reports that “no Republicans” signed on to this document and its set of recommendations.
Yet the basic outlines of this story have already been established by an extensive investigative report in The Post, which concluded that the U.S. government’s ability to prepare for this threat has been hampered by Trump’s refusal to accept that Russian sabotage of our election in 2016 happened at all. The Post noted that administration officials themselves acknowledge that Trump has “never convened a Cabinet-level meeting on Russian interference or what to do about it.”
Even worse, The Post noted that “there is an unspoken understanding” within the National Security Council that the matter must not be raised with the president, because this would “acknowledge its validity, which the president would see as an affront.” Incredibly, The Post reported that this is rooted in a refusal by Trump to accept what even many inside the administration “regard as objective reality.”
It is rapidly becoming the position of the whole GOP to join in this great abdication. First, it will be an interesting test to see how many Republicans — who, you may recall, previously condemned Russian meddling — join in endorsing even the general recommendations in this report, never mind the criticism of Trump.
What’s more, you can draw a line from this directly to other big displays of GOP abdication on the Russia front. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) released the transcript of the Fusion GPS co-founder’s congressional testimony, it was in response to the Republicans’ refusal to do the same. That refusal basically denied the American people crucial information that Republicans themselves had gathered about the genesis of the FBI probe into Trump-Russia collusion, simply because it didn’t prop up — but instead undercut — the alternate narrative that Republicans had developed with the purpose of casting efforts to hold Trump and his associates accountable as illegitimate.
The goal of that alt-narrative is in part to discredit the investigation as an abuse of power in its own right, by depicting the allegedly partisan Steele dossier as the trigger for the original FBI probe. But thanks to that released testimony, we have learned that the FBI apparently took the findings of the Steele dossier author seriously because they corroborated information the FBI had already gathered from other sources. Meanwhile, this abdication continues on other fronts. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are now weaponizing their probe against the FBI in service of this alt-narrative and are derailing the probe’s actual truth-seeking by refusing to green-light subpoenas to re-call Donald Trump Jr. and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fill in more detail about Trump’s efforts to impede the FBI investigation and, possibly, to obstruct justice.
Obviously one can argue that warnings of the Russian threat to future elections are overblown or that the collusion and potential Trump obstruction that have already been documented don’t amount to serious misconduct or crimes. But the point is that Republicans are working to frustrate a full accounting into all these matters without knowing what, exactly, they are preventing from seeing the light of day.
Democrats are finally mounting push-back that is commensurate with a recognition of the true nature of what we’re seeing here. The Cardin report marks a newly aggressive effort to sound the alarm about Trump’s abdication of responsibility to protect our elections. Feinstein’s release of the Fusion GPS testimony signals a recognition that Republicans are actively trying to suppress the truth at this point and that tougher measures are needed in response. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are mulling the release of a minority report that would detail the avenues of inquiry that Republicans have blocked. If Republicans are joining Trump in this great abdication, we are now seeing a new phase in the Democratic response to it.
Link to the report itself --
https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/medi ... inalRR.pdf
