My answer is, probably not. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are asking the FBI to investigate allegations (made by them) that Christopher Steele, author of the famous/infamous Trump dossier, may have lied to federal authorities. The basis for these allegations? Well, they aren’t saying. And Politico’s Kyle Chene, reporting on the travesty, underlines the absurdity of the matter with the following:
“One congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the decision by Grassley and Graham to refer Steele to the Justice Department raises an obvious anomaly.
“’They are referring to DOJ a criminal prosecution based on documents DOJ gave them and based on witness testimony to the DOJ,’ the aide said.”
Well, if wit and accuracy were worth a whit when it comes to Republican contempt for the law—and anything else that impedes their malice and corruption—I’d be smiling, but obviously I’m not.
You can count on Republicans in the House not to be outdone in pusillanimity by their senatorial colleagues in shame. House Speaker Paul Ryan, fresh from foisting a massively flawed tax “reform” bill on the American people, is now telling the Department of Justice and the FBI that from now on they’ll be taking orders from politicians, politicians whose idea of “justice” is seeing Hillary Clinton’s head on a pike.
There will be brief sound and fury over Fire and Fury, the book which tells us everything we already knew about the Trump White House, and much will be briefly made of the eclipse of Steve Bannon, who may be known as the American Ernst Röhm.1 But what Bannon talked about doing—and he has ever done little but talk—Grassley and Ryan and the entire worthless crew of Republican cowards on Capital Hill are all too likely to accomplish.
- Röhm was one of the founders of the Nazi Party, one of the few who took the “socialist” part of the party’s doctrine seriously and antagonized both capitalists and the German Army’s officer corps with his egalitarian sympathies. Röhm treated Hitler as a colleague, addressing him as “Adolph” rather than “mein Führer“, and was openly homosexual. If you’ve gotten this far, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Röhm and many of his associates were murdered in an extensive purge known as the Nacht der langen Messer (Night of the Long Knives), conducted in the early summer of 1934. ↩︎
