David Michael Miller
All Washington is agog over what fired FBI Director James Comey’s memos might tell us about President Trump, but Wisconsinite Reince Priebus might be vulnerable as well, as the Daily Beast has reported. Comey “almost certainly wrote a memo about [a] Feb. 15 conversation with Priebus,” the publication notes, and the details of that might show he was trying to head off the Russia investigation, which could rise to obstruction of justice, or at the least be very embarrassing.
Meanwhile, the administration Priebus runs was recently savaged as a “Human Resources disaster area” by conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, who’s well-connected to Republican politicos.
“The Trump administration,” he wrote, “has hundreds of senior and midlevel positions to fill, and... few people of any quality or experience are going to want to join a team that is already toxic. Nobody is going to want to become the next H.R. McMaster... who is now permanently tainted because he threw his lot in with Donald Trump.”
Brooks describes the staff Priebus oversees as “a self-cannibalizing piranha squad whose main activity is lawyering up,” an administration with an “unprecedented” level of leaking where “senior members of the White House staff” run to the media and “express disdain, exasperation, anger and disrespect for their boss.”
And at the center of all this is Priebus: “This is a White House in which the internal nickname for the chief of staff is Rancid.”
Wow. The press has speculated for months that Trump could fire Priebus. But that might actually be better for his reputation than to continue with an imploding administration.
Meanwhile, Priebus’ old friend, House Speaker Paul Ryan, is vulnerable to the most damning political charge — a lack of patriotism — because of his pragmatic embrace of Trump.
The latest evidence of this is a Washington Post story reporting that Ryan was in a meeting where House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy joked that Trump was on the payroll of Vladimir Putin.
This took place in June 2016, just one day after a story reported the Democratic National Committee had been hacked by the Russian government and not long after Ryan and McCarthy had “emerged from separate talks at the Capitol” with the Ukrainian prime minister who told them about “the Kremlin financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.”
Ryan’s response to McCarthy’s joke has the feel of a Mafia don shushing his lieutenants. He told the other Republicans in the room that “This is an off-the-record discussion... No leaks. . . . This is how we know we’re a real family here.”
This latest revelation adds more to a timeline of Ryan’s willingness to benefit from Russia’s cyber attack on America. He was one of 12 members of Congress briefed by U.S. intelligence agents about the Russian hacking and asked by President Barack Obama to present a united bipartisan front in opposition to this. But Ryan and Republicans declined. Instead, Ryan, as head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, oversaw a campaign that used documents hacked by the Russians against Democratic candidates.
Later, after Trump’s election, Ryan repeatedly resisted calls for a congressional investigation of Russian interference in America’s election. And then he continued to support Rep. Devin Nunes as the head of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, even after Nunes shared information from the probe with the president, a potential target of the investigation.
And after Trump fired Comey, the man leading the Russia investigation, Ryan defended the firing. Even after Trump admitted the Russia investigation helped push him to fire Comey, Ryan blamed Trump’s opponents for the situation, saying “It is obvious there are some people out there who want to harm the president.”
Meanwhile, Ryan’s popularity has been plummeting: a Journal Sentinel summary of five different national polls shows the Speaker’s approval rating ranged as low as 28 percent and his disapproval rating as high as 54 percent.
Most of this decline was among Democrats and independents, and reflected a general dissatisfaction with Trump and the House health care plan. But it suggests the peril of aligning yourself too closely with a very unpopular president.
Should Ryan someday run for president — clearly a future goal — his repeated unwillingness to stand up to a cyber attack on America by one of its greatest enemies could make him a fatally flawed candidate. That might even become a problem in running for reelection in Wisconsin in 2018, where the last Marquette Law School polls showed his disapproval rating has increased and half of respondents were concerned about Russian interference in the 2016 election — and this was in March, before Comey’s firing.
If Trump eventually faces a Watergate-style investigation, which looks increasingly likely, both Priebus and Ryan could be indelibly stained by their loyalty to him.
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com
