This Is Sabotage

On Wednesday, I wrote about how Republicans' latest transparent attempt to protect the indefensible Trump from accountability, by laying the groundwork for him to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller for bias, on the basis that two FBI officials, long before they were assigned to Mueller's investigation, had exchanged texts critical of Trump.

As I noted then: Simply having an opinion about Trump — no less one that has been expressed by members of his own cabinet — is not evidence of bias.

This is something TPM's Josh Marshall also observes in his piece, "Don't Look Away from the Disgrace."

Public employees are allowed to have political opinions. Indeed, there are laws specifically protecting government employees from being disciplined or having their work affected by their political views. The only real infraction here seems to be that the two used government devices to discuss their private political opinions when they should have reserved those for their personal devices — hardly a major infraction.

Nonetheless, defenders of the President have leaped from these emails to saying the entire Clinton emails probe — Strzok was involved in both probes — and the Mueller investigation are irreparably tainted. Others are going so far as to say the DOJ and the FBI need to undergo a political purge. The head of one prominent right-wing legal advocacy group went as far as to say the FBI should be shut down. It is a stark reminder of how many will go so far so quickly to prevent the enforcement of the law and lawful investigations when it comes to Donald Trump.

This is clearly sabotage. It's alarming the lengths to which Republicans and Trump's Justice Department are going in order to protect him.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's decision to release the text messages in the first place is deeply troubling — and Democrats have questions about that decision. On Wednesday, during a Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, they asked Rosenstein about the "unusual move" to invite reporters to the Department of Justice on the eve of his testimony, so reporters could examine and then report on the texts ahead of his appearance at the hearing.

Rosenstein explained that the DoJ "decided to make the text messages public after getting requests for them from Congress." He said in testimony: "Generally speaking, our goal is to be as forthcoming with the media as we can, when it is lawful and appropriate to do so. So I would not approve anybody disclosing something that was not appropriate to disclose."

This is a problem. Republican members of Congress request information be made public that they want to use to discredit the investigation into the president, and the Department of Justice makes them public, determining it's "appropriate" to disclose them, despite the fact that they are well aware how Republicans will (mis)use the information, which cannot reasonably be construed to be in the public interest.

The public interest doesn't matter to Republicans at all anymore.