Bannon's "Treason" Extends Deep Into The Republican Party As Well
Steve Bannon went where not even the most partisan Democratic official has dared go, calling the meeting in Trump Tower between the Trump campaign and the Russians “treasonous”. He also proclaimed it is a certainty that Don Jr. informed Trump about the results of that meeting, saying, “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office of the 26th floor is zero”, adding that “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.” Bannon concluded that “[e]ven if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
While the motivations for Bannon’s diatribes are unclear, he is very clear about how he would have handled such a “treasonous” meeting, saying, the meeting would be set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people” and whatever information they gleaned could “be dump[ed]…down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication…You never see it, you never know it…because you don’t need to.” In other words, he would use the Russian dirt as long as he could create plausible deniability. Some patriot.
Bannon also highlights the nexus between the Trump campaign’s collusion and Russian money laundering. Says Bannon, “This is all about money laundering…Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner…It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”
While Bannon’s comments are just another indication that the evidence for collusion and obstruction of justice against Trump are strong, it also heightens the rhetoric around the actions of the Trump campaign by actually throwing up the word “treason”. But we should never forget that, if treason occurred in last year’s campaign, it is not limited to the Trump campaign itself but extends well into the leadership of the Republican party.
Last fall, when confronted with evidence that the Russians were in the process of hacking our election and attacking our democracy, both Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell refused to issue a bipartisan statement condemning or even acknowledging the Russian attack. As John Heilemann said yesterday on “Deadline: White House”, that refusal “was one of the most grossly irresponsible, unpatriotic thing that two Congressional leaders, I think, have ever done, certainly in my lifetime. But they turned a blind eye to this, at a time when you could have done something about it in the middle of the campaign. It’s no surprise that they are still doing nothing about it now thirteen, fourteen months later.” And Nicole Wallace paraphrased Director of National Security Michael Hayden who calls the Republicans’ action the political version of 9/11, in the sense of knowing an attack of that magnitude was coming and refusing to do anything about it.
But Ryan was already well aware of the fact that Russia had hacked the Democrats in order to help Trump get elected back in June of 2016. An audiotape of a meeting between Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and other members of the House Republican leadership makes it clear that both Ryan and McCarthy believed that Trump was the beneficiary of the Russian hacks and McCarthy even stated that he believed the Russians were paying Trump. Although some in the group thought these remarks were made in jest, even if they were, we all know that there is a kernel of truth behind any good joke.
In early July, Senator Tom Cotton was suggesting that the Russians release Hillary’s deleted emails, which he mistakenly believed they had. Trump followed up on that suggestion by openly requesting that the Russians do so at a campaign event a few weeks later.
We also know that a Republican political operative took the hacked DNC emails directly from Guccifer 2.0 and packaged it for use by Republicans candidates in Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Texas.
As Jeremy Bash points out on that same MSNBC show above, collusion does not mean daily coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians. He prefers not to use the word collusion at all. The important element is that Trump and the Republican party “knew of and welcomed the Russian interference” because they knew it would be to their benefit. In starker words, an attack on the US by a foreign power was fine with the Republicans as long as the Democrats were the ones getting hurt.
Even worse, to this day, Republicans conspire with Trump to obstruct any serious investigation into this attack. Ryan and McConnell are only too willing to let members of their party undermine the investigating committees and attack Robert Mueller. In the House, Nunes, Gowdy, Jordan, Meadows, and Gohmert and, in the Senate, Grassley and even Burr have all been involved in actions at one point or another designed to subvert the inquiry. Neither Ryan or McConnell has taken any steps legislatively to protect us against a further attack in 2018.
Bannon has brought treason to the fore. But the betrayal of our country extends well beyond Trump, his family, and his campaign. It also involves the Republican leadership in Congress, especially Ryan and McConnell, and a large number of other Republican legislators. We should never lose sight of that. History will not.
