Right-wing outlets (from Fox News to Breitbart to the New York Post) took the bait from Nunes and his associates, dragging Susan Rice into the matter — without evidence of a crime. Indeed, no evidence of impropriety exists and no evidence ties Rice to the leaking of Michael T. Flynn’s name. Given that the White House does not want to release the documents shared with Nunes that allegedly provide the basis for its tale, we can surmise that Nunes really had no evidence of much of anything.

The blatant effort to confuse and distract from the biggest political scandal of our lifetimes — Russian efforts to manipulate our election process and potential coordination with the campaign of the beneficiary of Russia’s “active measures” — does not come as any surprise. However, certain right-wing media outlets’ willingness to echo Trump’s defamatory misdirection tactics remains as distressing as ever. (It was just this sort of echo chamber effect that Russia used during the campaign to help Trump, as Clint Watts recently explained.) Chin-stroking pundits were obliged to say, “Well, both these things are important” (as if the Rice narrative has a factual basis), and the damage thereby done. A serious investigation with extensive factual support becomes no more credible than Trump’s latest tweet.

The episode highlights a worrisome development with regard to our intelligence community. Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfareblog.com explain we run the risk of undoing the “grand bargain” (i.e. intelligence services get robust powers in exchange for equally robust oversight) that allows our intelligence community to operate within a democratic government. They explain:

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Today’s crisis is sparked by allegations, both by President Trump and by some House Republicans, of political misuse of the intelligence community by the Obama administration. Whether the allegations are entirely false or turn out to have elements of truth, they put the intelligence community in the cross-hairs, since some of the institutions that are supposed to be key legitimators are now functioning as delegitimators. After all, entirely appropriate investigations of counterintelligence can easily look like inappropriate political meddling, and if the President and the House Intelligence Committee chairman are not merely not defending the intelligence community but are actively raising questions about its integrity, the bargain itself risks unraveling.

And seen in this light, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) stubborn insistence on standing behind Nunes to perpetuate the assault on the integrity of the investigative process stands out as nothing less than unconscionable. Once again, Ryan’s partisanship has undermined his credibility.

Goldsmith and Wittes point out that “if the intelligence community had been in any way targeting the Trump team last year for collection, that should be bad news for the Trump team, since it would imply, in normal circumstances, wrongdoing. Indeed, the whole point of the narrative appears to be to discredit the Russia investigation (or some elements of it) by shifting the story away from Trump connections to the Russian wrongdoing to alleged wrongdoing in the investigation of the Russia matter.” They continue, “This appears to be Trump’s larger aim: To muddle the legitimacy of the intelligence community, and of FISA as a tool in this context, all with the aim of delegitimizing the Russia investigation and, perhaps, of delegitimizing broader internal executive branch checks on the presidency.”