Mitch McConnell

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is taking this whole Russia thing Very Seriously, except for the questions he wants to ignore and the select committee he doesn’t want to have looking into it. That’s the takeaway from what he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Wednesday, anyway:

I don't think we need a select committee. We know how to do our work. We have an Intelligence Committee. Over on the Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham has got a subcommittee that's going to take a look at it. I don't think we need to go through setting up a special committee. But we are going to look at Russian involvement in the U.S. election. It's a significant issue… We know they were messing around with it. We don't think they had any impact on the outcome, but obviously we're not going to ignore something like that.

“We are going to look at Russian involvement in the U.S. election.” That’s a start, but what about Trump campaign involvement with Russia? That seems like a meaningful omission from McConnell’s interests.

Also, interesting how now McConnell acknowledges Russian election interference as “a significant issue” and says “we know they were messing around with it,” but back in September, when the question was whether to alert the public as to what was going on, “during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.” So he went from threatening to raise hell if questionably accurate intelligence was made public, because it might influence the election and that would be bad and wrong, to acknowledging that “we know they were messing around with it,” but standing in the way of a select committee to investigate, and leaving Trump campaign involvement off the table.

Just a thought, but maybe McConnell’s record on this issue is not such that we should be listening to him. Maybe, just maybe—and by that I mean definitely and totally—he’s putting party before democracy, party before truth, party before the best interests of the American people.