Republicans: Stakes raised, but GOP given some cover
The appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election not only intensifies the legal stakes facing President Trump — it also delays a possible day of reckoning for congressional Republicans.
But Republicans who have largely stood by Trump through his often-chaotic first four months in office signaled even before Mueller’s appointment that they were repositioning their approach toward the Russian inquiry, should that day of reckoning come.
In the short term, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s decision to name Mueller as special counsel overseeing the Russian investigation removes some pressure on Republicans. They can now say that while Mueller’s investigation grinds along, there’s not much they can do about reports that Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey in February to end his probe into former
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s possible ties to the Russians.
“It does sort of insulate Republicans a bit,” said James Pfiffner, a public-policy professor at American University in Washington, D.C., who has written about scandals involving Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. “But I’m not sure that Republicans wanted this.”
The problem for the GOP, said Pfiffner: If one of the Republican-led congressional probes now under way “had found something bad, they could tamp down the language a bit in their report. But if a special counsel finds something, (he) can bring criminal charges.”
Some Republicans acknowledged that the situation for Trump has sharply worsened.
GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona expressed astonishment at the flood of revelations over the past week and raised the comparison to the scandal that felled Nixon, telling an International Republican Institute dinner on Tuesday, “We’ve seen this movie before. It’s reaching Watergate size and scale.”
Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was asked by a reporter whether Trump’s reported request to Comey, if true, could be an impeachable offense. He replied, “Yes.”
Such comments amount to “baby steps” in the direction of a possible congressional attempt to remove Trump from office, said Allan Lichtman, author of “The Case for Impeachment,” a book laying out a rationale for ousting Trump.
Lichtman, one of the few pundits who predicted that Trump would win the presidency, said the main pursuit of every politician “is survival ... aAnd if they feel that being close to Trump could hurt them, then they’ll move away from him. It may not be to their political advantage to have Trump to continue to kick around while this drip, drip, drip of a scandal keeps going.”
Several GOP members of Congress put some distance between themselves and Trump for the first time. Among them was Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah — chairman of the oversight panel and a conservative hero for relentlessly pursuing allegations of malfeasance against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the deaths of four Americans in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
On Wednesday, Chaffetz asked the FBI to turn over communications between Trump and Comey. If the FBI declines, Chaffetz tweeted. “I have my subpoena pen ready.”
Republican Sens. Richard Burr of North Carolina, chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, head of the Judiciary Committee, asked Comey to testify before their panels. Grassley also asked the FBI and White House for records “memorializing interactions with Mr. Comey relating to the FBI’s investigation” of both the Russian election interference and Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
With an eye toward their 2018 re-election campaigns, some Republican incumbents who could be vulnerable were already out ahead of the Mueller announcement. They included Rep. Steve Knight, RLancaster (Los Angeles County), who said Tuesday that it was time for a special prosecutor to take over. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), called in February for an independent inquiry. Both represent districts that Clinton won in November.
This kind of political pressure is key, Lichtman said, because this “is absolutely not a constitutional crisis unless politicians make it one.”
John Trasviña, dean of the University of San Francisco’s law school, said a constitutional crisis occurs when one of the three branches of government exceeds its powers and “the other branches are unwilling or unable to exert their authority.”
Until Wednesday, Trasviña said, most congressional Republicans were like an emergency dispatcher who ignores a ringing phone.
“You had a lot of smoke and a little fire and people were calling 911, and there was no answer,” said Trasviña, who was general counsel for the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution in the 1990s.
What changed Wednesday, he said, wasn’t just the growing unease from Republicans, but the fact that veterans such as Grassley — who came to Congress in 1975, a year after Nixon’s resignation — stepped forward.
Other analysts pointed out that the Justice Department and congressional probes are still in their infancy.
“People forget that Watergate took two years to unfold,” said Evan Thomas, a longtime journalist and author of the best-selling “Being Nixon: A Man Divided.”
Trump’s reported request to Comey to short-circuit the investigation, if true, “feels like a smoking gun,” Thomas said. “But with obstruction of justice, a lot of things need to be known first. It’s way too premature to say that Trump will be impeached or is a goner.”