Did the Russians finally get to Chuck Grassley?

| 5:34 pm EDT October 25, 2017
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For months I’ve been giving credit where it’s due to Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley. He had been consistently signing off on anything the Democrats on his committee wanted to investigate when it came to Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. But now something has, suddenly and fundamentally, changed. In fact Grassley has flipped so profoundly to the dark side that it’s enough to seriously question whether the Russians may have gotten to him.

Thanks to a new exposé from Mother Jones (link), it’s now clear that much of what I’ve long surmised is true. Grassley has indeed been giving Dianne Feinstein and the Democrats on his committee whatever they wanted when it came to Trump-Russia. He’s been running a few sideshow investigations into nonsense about Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch simply to give himself political cover with his own conservative constituency, in case anyone questioned why he was so willing to let the Democrats eat Trump alive over Russia. Except now that’s all suddenly changed – to the point that the Democrats on the committee are suddenly done with him.

Feinstein and the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are now splitting off and running the Trump-Russia investigation all on their own, even as Grassley and the Republicans on the committee will focus strictly on the phony sideshows aimed at helping Trump. He’s also calling for a Special Counsel to investigate the imaginary Obama-Hillary-Russia uranium scandal. Here’s the question: why now? What could prompt Grassley to go from six months of consistently supporting the Trump-Russia investigation, to suddenly washing his hands of it in favor of becoming a pure propagandist for Trump and Russia?

Chuck Grassley is eighty-four years old and he’s almost certainly not running for reelection in 2022. So it’s not as if the Republican Senate leadership has any real leverage over him. This takes us back to the long simmering question of why Grassley was sitting with a Russian member of Parliament at the National Prayer Breakfast in February (link). His sudden absurd change in behavior raises what might otherwise be an absurd question: have the Russians finally gotten to Grassley?