When you represent the president’s party on Capitol Hill, a line of rebuttal usually materializes in times of White House turmoil: Well, their personnel decisions are up to them. It is a line that Republicans on the Hill have found highly useful when asked anything about, say, white nationalist poster boy and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. And it is a line that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell found useful on Tuesday while discussing the resignation of Gen. Michael Flynn as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
“As far as White House personnel is concerned, it’s the president’s call, everybody at the White House serves at his pleasure,” McConnell said when asked about Flynn’s resignation at his press conference Tuesday. “He can speak for himself on that.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill couldn’t just come out and say that they had no comment, or no plans to engage with the Flynn scandal. Scratch that—some of them, like House Oversight Committee chief Jason Chaffetz, could indeed say pretty much that, as if the question of Russia’s influence in the Trump administration lived and died with the 24-day tenure of Flynn. Both Chaffetz and House Speaker Paul Ryan positioned this as a simple matter of Flynn lying to a more senior member of the administration, and not part of a larger question about what, precisely, is going on between the Trump people and Russia. It just doesn’t interest the speaker of the House the way that, say, tax cuts do.
But Senate Republicans aren’t all silent. Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of the intelligence committee, was the guy designated to tell the press about how seriously they take all of this. The Senate Intelligence Committee, Blunt and McConnell said, has already been investigating Russia’s interference in the election. They argued that the Flynn scandal, and whatever else emerges regarding Russia’s ties with Trump, would fall under the purview of that body.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has more ambitious investigatory visions than timetable-free poking around by a Republican-led Senate committee. He is calling not just for oversight from congressional committees but an independent criminal investigation by the executive branch.
“There needs to be an independent and transparent investigation, because the White House knew for weeks that General Flynn misled the Vice President, and that his discussion about sanctions with the Russian government could potentially compromise our national security because he was subject to blackmail,” Schumer said in a press conference Tuesday. “And yet they let him stay on for weeks, present at and participating in the highest level of national security discussions.”
“If an investigation is not independent, non-partisan, and most of all transparent, there’s no guarantee this administration will take the decisive and immediate actions necessary to keep our country safe,” he continued. “The White House counsel cannot lead this investigation and the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, cannot be the person to lead that investigation.”
Schumer wouldn’t specify what would meet his criteria for an independent investigation: perhaps an FBI investigation, or the appointment of an independent counsel. All he knows is that he wants one from which Sessions, due to his personal ties with Flynn and Trump, recuses himself.
It sounded like Schumer was asking for one step above what anyone with power would ever offer, so Democrats might be able to say that Republicans were covering up for Trump. There is no way, you’d imagine, that Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department—or any entity within it—would allow for a true investigation into Trump’s or his team’s connections with Russia.
The New York Times reported Tuesday, though, that FBI agents had “interviewed Michael T. Flynn when he was national security adviser in the first days of the Trump administration about his conversations with the Russian ambassador … If he was not entirely honest with the F.B.I., it could expose Mr. Flynn to a felony charge.”
Not to get ahead of ourselves, but if the FBI were to recommend charges, Sessions, as attorney general, would have final say. This is why Schumer may have demanded Sessions get himself out of the way, just as former Attorney General Loretta Lynch pledged to accept the FBI’s recommendation on Hillary Clinton’s private server investigation.
But, again, these are just decisions for the executive branch to make. Don’t bother asking congressional Republicans about them.
