Republican Party hits panic button, unwittingly admits its own guilt in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal

| 4:31 pm EDT September 1, 2017
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For months, the Republican Party has largely sat back and allowed the investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal to move full steam ahead. They may not have liked the idea of a president of their own party being exposed as a criminal traitor, but they didn’t want to be seen as impeding the most important investigation in U.S. history. However, all that changed yesterday. We all know what triggered it. And we all know how to interpret the GOP’s sudden panic.

Yesterday it was revealed that during the meeting between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian government representatives, campaign chair Paul Manafort wrote down the words “RNC” and “donations” next to each other. And in what we’re supposed to believe is some kind of cosmic coincidence, the Republican Party is suddenly claiming that former FBI Director James Comey was plotting to exonerate Hillary Clinton. The Comey/Clinton story is absolutely nothing, but when spun dishonestly, it serves as a temporary distraction from what yesterday’s and today’s real headlines are.

It’s clear that the Republican Party leadership is now desperate to distract from the “RNC donations” storyline. That’s telling, considering that the story itself doesn’t even implicate anyone in the Republican National Committee or Republican Party. For all we know, the Kremlin reps offered to funnel money into the RNC, the Trump campaign wrote it down, and it never happened. In that case, this story wouldn’t hurt any of the Republicans in Congress. But they’re panicking like there’s more to it, even willing to look foolish in the process by pushing a Comey story that merely makes them look ridiculous.

So why are Republican leaders hitting the panic button over the “RNC donations” story? Four weeks ago Palmer Report reported on the millions of dollars the Republican Party leader Mitch McConnell took from a pro-Kremlin oligarch in just barely legal fashion (link). Is that just the tip of the iceberg? Is there more to it? The GOP isn’t panicking over this Manafort story for nothing. In so doing, they’re admitting their own guilt. Now we just have to figure out what precisely they’re guilty of having done.