KEEPIN' ALL MY SECRETS SAFE TONIGHT

#ReleaseTheMemo - that's the latest Russian twitter bot campaign.  It seems that Republican treason-weasel Devin Nunes has written a top-secret memo.  His fellow Republicans claim that the memo exposes the existence of a Deep State plot, a “secret society” in the FBI which conspired to rig the 2016 presidential election by using the now-famous Steele Dossier to sabotage the Trump campaign.

There’s one teensy problem with this theory – the inconvenient truth that no Democrat, not even arch-villains Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, used the information in the Steele Dossier during the campaign, when it might have made a difference.  That’s quite a conspiracy - collect damaging information on your opponent and then don't use it!  How fiendishly clever!

Of course, the FBI did intervene in the election, in the form of James Comey’s bizarre last-minute insinuations about Hillary Clinton’s email issues, which may well have been the key to Donald Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory.  If the Deep State was trying to help Hillary, they screwed up royally. 

I’m on record as loving a good conspiracy theory, but this one just doesn’t pass muster.  It could work with a little tweaking, though.  What if the Deep State decided that the best way to ruin Donald Trump was to make him president?  Maybe the Deep State Strategic Planning Committee said, “Let’s put this minor league grifter in the spotlight and watch him commit impeachable offenses out of sheer stupidity.  And while we’re at it, let’s show America how corrupt and incompetent the Republican Party really is.  Let’s give them control of the government and watch them trip over their own feet.  We'll expose Evangelicals as such big hypocrites that they’ll never be able to criticize the personal character of a Democratic candidate again.  This’ll be the last election Republicans will ever win!”

As conspiracy theories go, that one’s actually not bad, if I do say so myself.  Feel free to share this new rumor with your Deplorable acquaintances.

The other peculiar thing about Nunes’ memo is that Republicans are simultaneously demanding its release, and refusing to release it.  Since they wrote it, they could release it anytime they wanted.  Donald Trump could declassify it.  The House Intelligence Committee could declassify it.  Any member of Congress could legally read the four-page memo out loud on the floor of the House or Senate.  Or they could make it public the old-fashioned way, by leaking it to the press.  As of this writing, they haven’t done any of those things.   

Instead, they speak darkly of scandal and treason without providing a scintilla of evidence for any of their claims.  That being the case, the prudent assumption is that the Nunes Memo is bullshit.  It’s just Nunes doing what he always does, running interference for Donald Trump.

In short term, that may be a good sign, since it means Trump and his Republican enablers know they’re in trouble, and that, for the time being at least, they’ve decided that it’s too risky to fire Robert Mueller.  Instead, they’re spinning conspiracy theories in a preemptive effort to discredit Mueller, the FBI, the press, and everyone else who’s trying to learn the truth about what went on during the 2016 presidential campaign.  Whatever Mueller and others reveal about Trump and his crime gang, they’ll call it a Deep State conspiracy, and claim that it’s the investigators who should be investigated.  They’re already calling their political opponents traitors and threatening to lock them up. 

Remarkably, the Republican Party is doing its best to undermine the legitimacy of the very government it now controls.  They’re trying to dismantle democracy one piece at a time, and it’s not impossible that they’ll get away with it.   The longer Republicans remain in power, the more damage they’ll do. 

I know I sound like a broken record here, but the stakes in the 2018 congressional elections couldn’t be higher.  We have to register, vote, contribute, campaign – maybe even form a secret society or two.  Do whatever it takes to make America great again.