It’s been nearly a week since Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a bizarre report that alleged that Donald Trump’s Russia scandal was the result of a “treasonous conspiracy” by Democrats, and the political world has quickly reached an uncomfortable equilibrium.
On the one hand, everyone who’s seriously examined the DNI’s findings quickly came to realize that her document has been discredited, with independent analyses characterizing Gabbard’s report as “ludicrous.” On the other hand, the incumbent president, his team and his partisan allies — desperate to both rewrite an embarrassing history and distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — are determined to play make-believe, pretending that Barack Obama and other Democrats really were responsible for some kind of seditious “coup,” reality be damned.
With this in mind, every day this week has been basically the same: Gabbard keeps shoveling obvious garbage; independent fact-checkers and objective analyses keep proving her wrong; and Trump and his aligned partisans keep trumpeting nonsense as if it were real. Rinse, lather, repeat.
The equilibrium, however, is not permanent.
On Capitol Hill, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas now want a special counsel to investigate the Obama administration’s actions, which is every bit as bonkers as it seems. A day earlier, the Justice Department also threw off the balance a bit by adding something new to the scales. The New York Times reported:
The Justice Department announced on Wednesday the formation of a task force to look into unsubstantiated allegations by President Trump that President Barack Obama and his aides ordered an investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia to destroy Mr. Trump.
The move didn’t come with great fanfare — there was, for example, no press conference or public event announcing the launch — but the DOJ did issue a written statement alerting the public to “the formation of a Strike Force” that will examine Gabbard’s preposterous allegations.
Members of this “strike force” will, the statement added, “investigate potential next legal steps which might stem from DNI Gabbard’s disclosures.”
“The Department of Justice is proud to work with my friend Director Gabbard and we are grateful for her partnership in delivering accountability for the American people,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in the written statement. “We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice.”
The same document added that the Justice Department “takes alleged weaponization of the intelligence community with the utmost seriousness,” which seemed rather ironic given the degree to which the director of national intelligence is obviously weaponizing the intelligence community. Time will tell, of course, what, if anything, comes of the new “strike force.” Indeed, MAGA activists who heard about this and got their hopes up might want to temper their expectations: DOJ lawyers know that while outlandish claims might help generate misguided reports in conservative media, they can’t bring those same claims to a courtroom or a grand jury and expect to succeed. Nevertheless, the mere existence of this “strike force” is ridiculous, and a reminder of a larger concern: Just because the Trump administration is trying to use this absurdity to distract attention from the Epstein scandal doesn’t mean nothing will happen. Or as Charlie Sykes summarized during an appearance on MSNBC around this time four years ago, “A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.” This post updates our related earlier coverage. It’s also been revised with additional details from Capitol Hill.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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