President Trump once exclaimed to me, “Devin Nunes has balls!”—holding both hands out as if they held two grapefruits. Something tells me the same cannot be said for Trey.
Nunes had created the marquee witness list to expose the Russia hoax early, before more harm could be done to America: Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Rice…all the deep state names you now know as premeditated traitors. Ryan then “directed” Gowdy and Goodlatte, as chairmen of the Oversight and Judiciary Committees, to perform the investigation. Sadly, it was all performance and zero investigation.
While Goodlatte said little (he is a man with very little to say), Gowdy couldn’t stop talking. And his words hurt our quest for justice. On May 29, 2018, he appeared on The Story with Martha MacCallum after emerging from a closed-door meeting with Speaker Ryan, FBI Acting Director/apologist Christopher Wray, and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (as I write, Wray still holds his position at the FBI, although I suspect he won’t be there in a second Trump term). Gowdy declared on MacCallum’s show, “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what their fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got—and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”
Gowdy’s defense of the deep state was devastating. He gave the FBI a cleansing cat bath before the nation. In every interview Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, or I did subsequently, we would be confronted with Gowdy’s embrace of those attacking the president. “What do you know that Trey Gowdy doesn’t?” we were asked incessantly.
Momentum was lost. Crooks in our own government escaped and suffered only the tepid indictment of government reports, not grand juries.
On May 14, 2019, I called for the release of sworn interview transcripts from the Intelligence Committee. Almost a year to the day later, they were released. They exposed that all along Trey Gowdy had known about the lack of legitimate predicate for the Russia hoax. He knew it when he took interviews with potential witnesses and got responses in 2017—and when he scuttled our work in 2018.
Gowdy would later sheepishly admit his “mistake” during an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight, enjoying post-Congress life as a Fox News contributor. Little good it does us now. He had let the voters down and allowed a scam to continue. History should judge him harshly for his failure to judge the facts honestly.
At the time, what the Democrats couldn’t do electorally, they had to do antidemocratically. Donald Trump was victorious, but he still had the haters and the losers to contend with, and some were ensconced in the federal government. Some of them were even appointed by him. Personnel is policy, but in the rush during Russiagate, many positions were not given the careful attention they deserved and were instead filled by people the establishment recommended and whom the Trump team gambled they could trust.
This, too, was by design. Taking President Trump’s attention away from his duties, they wound up disrupting the flow of his presidency. FBI background checks dragged on for languid weeks and months. Leaks of sensitive information were frequent and vicious, and not always true.
Everybody was handwringing and bedwetting as if it were all Watergate to justify the obsessive focus on Russian collusion. They even brought back some of the Watergate cast of characters, including disgraced CNN commentator John Dean, though this bunch’s second act was less Watergate 2.0 and more like Grumpier Old Men.
To be honest, I don’t think many Americans could find Russia on a map, even if people joked that Sarah Palin said that she could see it from her porch. While the globalist Left might see that as a criticism, I see it as an indication of how far we’ve come. My parents did nuclear attack drills at their schools, feeling the ever-present tension of the world’s most dangerous game of chicken. We don’t care now because we don’t have to care. George W. Bush thought he could see into Putin’s soul, John McCain thought he saw the KGB in there, and Mitt Romney saw the crippling former empire as our greatest geopolitical foe. Okay, boomers.
Russia has never mattered less in my lifetime. Its two main exports are models and oil, and America has plenty of both. When was the last time you used a Russian product? Russia is never either as strong or as weak as she looks, however, and she may yet prove to be more dangerous on her way down to demographic ruination than she was on her way up to communist dominion.
I have been on many television broadcast shows—it’s hard not to see me if you watch enough TV. But you will never see me interviewed on Russia Today, that modern-day version of Pravda. I believe Russia belongs not in the future but the past and that her ailing economy and oligarchic politics reflect that growing realization. Everybody who can is trying to get out of Russia—with whatever cash or arms they can launder through British, French, or Swiss property markets.
It isn’t quite the end of history. I don’t believe Russia or her satellites will become good neoliberals tomorrow or maybe ever. As Russia weakens, the line between state action and criminal thuggery all but disappears. At least they no longer pretend to have a compelling, competing vision of the world beyond raw power and thievery, though. Seen another way, the KGB may be all that is holding Russia together and preventing its oblivion.
To be sure, gangsters can still imperil our security. Just look at the chaos south of our own border. But the cartels have something Americans want and some even need to buy—drugs. We don’t need Russia quite as desperately.
But
