Greg Sargent reports on yet another mind-boggling example of right wing hypocrisy:
In their frantic efforts to disrupt the work of the House select committee examining Jan. 6, Donald Trump’s co-conspirators have advanced a singular argument: The committee lacks any “legitimate legislative purpose.”
This is ridiculous on its face. Members of the committee have repeatedly said their work may inform efforts to reform the congressional process of counting presidential electors, which Trump sought to exploit. There are other obvious potential legislative purposes as well.
I think maybe their legislative purpose should be to pass a law making it illegal for the president to plot a coup. Apparently we need one.
But this argument has grown even more absurd now that it’s being advanced by the lawyer who may have been most directly involved in plotting how Trump could overturn his 2020 election loss.
We’re talking about John Eastman, who wrote that now-notorious memo advising Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, to refuse to count Joe Biden’s electors from numerous states, to tip the election to Trump.
Eastman has just sued the Jan. 6 committee and Verizon over the committee’s subpoena of his phone records, which the committee is seeking to shed further light on the plot to overturn the election. The lawsuit asks the court to block the subpoena.
Underlying this dispute is something larger than this particular lawsuit’s legal complexities, and larger than the battle between the committee and Trump’s co-conspirators. What’s really at stake is whether this effort to overturn U.S. democracy through extraordinary corruption and then mob violence merits a political and policy response of any kind.
The answer to this question from Trumpworld, and indeed from many congressional Republicans, is essentially, “No.”
Honestly, this level of shamelessness makes me want to crawl under the covers and stay there. How dare they?
These are people who spent month after month, millions of dollars and endless hours investigating the President Clinton’s alleged lying in a civil case that was dismissed and the tragic death of four Americans in a terrorist hot zone for the express purpose (admitted by Kevin McCarthy) of destroying Hillary Clinton. And now they claim that an investigation into a riot that took place inside the Capitol with the purpose of overturning an election is off limits? Get outta here.
And those very same people who reveled in the hacking and publishing of Jon Podesta’s emails, demanded that Hillary Clinton turn over every private message (even exhorting the Russian government to do it for her) are also claiming that the government can’t see their phone records … because they have a 4th Amendment right to privacy.
Caterwauling by people who weaponized congressional investigations decades ago is just too much. No.
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