No wonder Chuck Grassley is coming out against Donald Trump
Earlier this week Republican Senator Chuck Grassley made a point of publicly defending the Ukraine whistleblower against Donald Trump’s escalating threats and attacks. This was a clear sign that Grassley thinks Trump might end up going down, and he’s hedging his bets in case he needs to make the argument later that he wasn’t the one propping Trump up toward the end. Now we may have a better sense of why.
For some time there has been scattered reporting about a second whistleblower, this one exposing that one of Donald Trump’s appointees had blocked the IRS from auditing Trump’s taxes. This afternoon the Washington Post reported that not only is this second whistleblower report already in the hands of at least one Democratic House committee chair, it’s also in the hands of the Republican Senate Finance Committee Chair, who just happens to be – you guessed it – Chuck Grassley.
This means that Grassley already knows the details of Trump’s attempt at keeping himself from being audited (WaPo leaves open the theoretical possibility that it’s about Pence not Trump, but that makes no logical sense). More to the point, Grassley knows whatever details are in the complaint about why Trump was going to be audited. If this whistleblower is close enough to the process to know that the audit was happening and that it had been sabotaged, the whistleblower is probably close enough to know what shady transactions or fraud caused Trump to come up for audit to begin with.
So now we’ve got a prominent Republican Senator publicly coming out against Donald Trump in one whistleblower scandal, even while he’s privately aware of potentially damning evidence against Trump in another whistleblower scandal. That can’t be a coincidence. Grassley knows Trump is hosed on every level. He’s knows it’s coming out. And after Trump goes down, he selfishly wants to be able to say later that he was on the right side of this.
