Why Senate Republicans chose now to kneecap Donald Trump on Russia

| 9:12 am EDT May 9, 2018
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Yesterday we saw a stunning series of bombshells, all relating to Donald Trump’s various scandals, play out in the course of one afternoon. One of those bombshells came from the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, which finally more or less admitted that Russia rigged the vote totals in Trump’s favor. To understand why certain powerful GOP Senators chose yesterday to acknowledge that Trump wasn’t legitimately elected, you have to understand how yesterday’s events related to each other.

The first bombshell was when Donald Trump announced that he was ripping up the Iran peace deal. We all knew that was coming when he began hyping his announcement in advance; if he were going to keep the deal in place, he would have done it quietly. Hours later, Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti revealed that everyone from the Kremlin to AT&T has been lining the pockets of Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen. Then after that, the Senate Intel Committee made its announcement, with Chairman Richard Burr and James Lankford being the two Republicans who made a point of putting their name on it. So who knew what was coming, and who didn’t?

The Senate Intel Committee definitely knew in advance that Trump was going to tear up the Iran deal today. Trump probably knew that the committee was going to announce today that the election was illegitimate. Neither of them could have known that Avenatti was going to unleash his bombshell. Avenatti would have known the Iran controversy was coming today, and he therefore may have been trying to derail whatever Trump was trying to get out of it, but Avenatti probably couldn’t have known that the Senate report was coming.

Now all three of these earth-shifting stories are fighting each other today for headline placement and airtime. So it’s possible, and maybe even probable, that Trump chose today to create the Iran controversy because he wanted to distract from the Russian hacking report. It’s up to you to decide whether the Republicans on the Senate Intel Committee, who were going to have to release this Russian hacking information sooner or later, chose today because they wanted it to get buried under the Iran controversy, or because they saw the Iran mess as the last straw. In any case, these particular GOP Senators did in fact release it instead of trying to keep it secret, which – at the least – means they’re not willing to stick their necks out for Trump.