Republicans in Congress scramble after Robert Mueller targets one of their own with indictment
If you’ve been paying attention to Palmer Report or any other political news outlet that’s been doing its job, you were not at all surprised to see Roger Stone referenced in Robert Mueller’s latest Trump-Russia indictments. Mueller has been building a grand jury case against Stone for weeks, and the Russian hacker indictments are just a warm-up for when Stone himself is indicted and arrested. But what is surprising is that Mueller has targeted a Republican Congressman in these Russian hacker indictments – and it’s sent the party scrambling.
To be clear, we don’t know the identity of the GOP Congressman who is accused of having conspired with Russian government hackers with regard to stolen Democratic Party secrets. Shortly after Donald Trump was briefed on the indictments, he tweeted a conspicuous defense of Congressman Matt Gaetz, who has close ties to Roger Stone. While this raises eyebrows, it does not prove that Gaetz is the Congressman referenced in the indictment; it could easily be someone else. But whoever it is, that individual is about to get indicted – and that’s a big deal.
We’ve seen sitting members of Congress indicted before. For instance, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez was indicted for various alleged crimes in 2015, and he was put on criminal trial for it. But this is different. We’re talking about a member of Congress being criminally indicted for allegedly conspiring with a foreign enemy to try to alter the outcome of a U.S. election. To find something roughly comparable, you’d have to go back to Benedict Arnold conspiring with the British in 1780 – and even then, he was a military officer, not an elected official. The GOP seems to understand just how significant this is, and we’re seeing some very different reactions.
Far-right GOP Congressmen Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows have responded to the news by trying to hurry up and remove Rod Rosenstein via impeachment. There is literally zero chance of this succeeding. But whoever the mystery Congressman is in the indictment, these two guys are sure trying to get him off the hook. Then you have Republicans running away from this mess as fast as they can. As recently as last week, GOP Congressman Trey Gowdy was playing up phony conspiracies about the FBI in the name of running interference for Donald Trump. Now Gowdy has suddenly been spooked into defending Rosenstein and Mueller, and urging Trump to demand that Putin turn over the indicted Russians so they can be put on trial.
So we’re seeing various Republicans in Congress deal with this situation in some very different ways. But they’re scrambling for a reason. They know that Robert Mueller indicted these Russian spies in order to establish that the election hacking was a criminal conspiracy, so he can turn around and indict the Americans who were involved in that conspiracy. We just saw a Republican Congressman referenced in an indictment of Russian spies, and that Congressman is about to be indicted on charges somewhere along the lines of treason. It’s going to hit the entire GOP like a sledgehammer, and they know it.
