During my first year in Congress, my best friends worked in the Atlanta Airport, Hartsfield. There was no direct flight from my district to Washington then, so Hartsfield is where I spent much of my free time. One July 2017 layover, I called my mentor, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. “Aren’t you tired of just taking punches in the face, Jim?” I asked. “I’ve got a plan to raise our fists and start swinging back. Wanna hear it?” He did.
Jim Jordan is Congress’s most talented and hardest-working member. Like me, he is not a patient man. He is that rare combination of someone who both honorably serves in Congress and actually likes serving in Congress. A national champion collegiate wrestler and legit political Firebrand himself, Jordan once told me that the reason he loved the job was that every day was a chance to compete hard for something to help people. If I couldn’t convince Jordan, my plan was going nowhere.
“Why is only Trump facing a special counsel? We all know Hillary was using the Clinton Foundation as her international money-laundering operation. We know this ‘dossier’ is Russian interference fueled by the Democrats. Let’s come out for a special counsel to investigate them too!”
Jordan bit the line so hard I almost had to readjust the drag. He was all in to turn up the heat. Reps. Ron DeSantis, Mark Meadows, Andy Biggs, Mike Johnson, Raul Labrador, and many others soon joined. The last Republican Judiciary Committee member to join our new offensive game plan was Chairman Goodlatte. When the letter finally went to Attorney General Sessions calling for parity in the special counsel game, Goodlatte placed it above his signature. We had dislodged the cemented Republican establishment, if only for a moment.
Soon, though, a frustrated Trump noticed a few of us were now eager to stop playing defense and fight back against the phony proceedings. It was time to make some noise in the congressional hearings about it all instead of just sitting there like a bunch of worried defendants told by their lawyer not to testify on their own behalf. It’s not just that this quiet tactic tends to make your side look guilty. It also means you’re not pointing out wrongdoing on the other side. Time to go on offense. Silence is stupidity is complicity.
It was clear that the anti-Trump forces were willing to try winning the whole struggle through innuendo even if it went nowhere in court. Denigrate, then destroy, but never debate.
No longer limited by any rules of decorum that might have restrained her while still in the White House, former national security advisor Susan Rice, no doubt taking her cue from powerful friends like Obama and Hillary Clinton, said on ABC News in July 2017 of Trump:
“He’s taken a series of steps that, had Vladimir Putin dictated them, [Trump] couldn’t have mirrored more effectively. What his motivations are, I think is a legitimate question, one that the Special Counsel is investigating, but the policies this president has pursued globally have served Vladimir Putin’s interests in dividing the West, undermining democracy.”
Here’s a question for Rice: Is it not undermining democracy for an unelected group of bureaucrats to decide what can and can’t be done by the next president?
Her main argument in closed-door hearings was that Trump allies such as Flynn kept downplaying the Russian threat, calling it a declining power, and describing China as a rising danger—as indeed it is! But maybe it was Trump’s frequent campaign talk of getting tough with China in trade negotiations that really freaked them out. China is not only rising in importance relative to Russia, but it also—as recent events have made clear—has its tentacles deep inside the American business, academic, and political establishment, where it has spread around millions of dollars. China’s apologists include venture capitalists like Mike Moritz of Sequoia (which backed Google!) and New York Times columnists like Thomas Friedman, who openly envy China’s authoritarian leftism.
Establishment Republicans, for their part, were equally wary of Trump’s potential to rock the boat. I think some were genuinely unsure how they wanted to see the Mueller investigation play out. Many were content to roll the dice and avoid staking out a strong position on the merits of the underlying evidence.
It was an unholy if convenient alliance between Democrats, establishment Republicans, and the Permanent Washington bureaucracy. At the time Mueller was appointed, Speaker Ryan, Rep. Gowdy, and Sen. Lindsey Graham all supported the appointment of a special counsel, with Graham (later to become a fiery critic of the Democrats’ impeachment circus) assuring the public that the Mueller investigation was “not a witch hunt.” Trust the process, they all said. But the process was the punishment and the political outcome desired.
For my part, I viewed Mueller’s appointment as an attempt to put a legalistic gloss on a political attack upon the president, done with the help of establishment Republicans like Goodlatte.
By the time he left office in 2019, Goodlatte—elected in 1992—had been chair of the Judiciary Committee for six years and, in the mid-2000s, chair of the powerful House Agriculture Committee for four. You don’t serve as the chairman of not one but two congressional committees if you don’t blindly follow leadership. The warriors quickly realized that dealing with Goodlatte was worthless.
I wasn’t going to just sit back and let gridlock carry the day. For a populist revolt to fizzle out in ambiguous legal proceedings would be one of the saddest letdowns in the history of our democracy. Those of us who had been willing to fight to get Trump and his allies into office were now spoiling for a fight on the House floor. Behind the scenes, Trump, who understands stagecraft, looked forward to seeing what we could do.
Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jordan, Nunes, Meadows, Biggs, and others emerged as the new class of fighters. Starting in the summer of 2017, we openly said that no collusion had been proven with anything like normal legal standards. We
