It's time for Democrats to take this drastic step on Trump and Russia

By Greg Sargent January 8 at 10:08 AM

THE MORNING PLUM:

The escalating campaign by President Trump’s allies to discredit the ongoing Russia investigation is based partly on the idea that the probe itself is an illegitimate abuse of power. Some Republicans in Congress are all in on this alt-narrative and are going to great lengths to employ Congress’s investigative machinery to bolster it, plainly in hopes of keeping the real truth about Trump and Russia from coming out. But Democrats can make it harder for Republicans to get away with this. Democrats need to ensure that the transcripts of testimony delivered to Congress by the co-founders of the firm that commissioned the so-called Steele Dossier are made public. Hardball procedural tactics toward this end do exist: A Democratic senator can try to make the transcripts public by reading them into the congressional record on the floor.

This morning, two Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee — Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) — sent a letter to GOP committee chair Charles Grassley demanding the release of the transcripts. A Democratic leadership aide tells me that if the GOP majority refuses, Democrats will escalate calls for the transcripts’ release in coming days.

The narrative that Trump’s allies are spinning holds that the genesis of the original FBI probe into Russian sabotage of our election and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with it (which became special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe) originated with the Steele Dossier, which details links between Trump and Russia but has lots of uncorroborated information. This is supposed to show that the probe itself is compromised or illegitimate, because at one point Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier, was retained by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Thus, the probe is rooted in partisan dirty tricks, and because the dossier is based on info from Russian sources, this means (presto!) Hillary Clinton is the one who actually colluded with Russia.

This narrative took a major blow last week when the two co-founders of Fusion GPS published a New York Times op-ed detailing their own testimony to Congress on these matters. They said they told Congress — mainly the Judiciary Committee — that the original funding for their research was a conservative publication; that they don’t believe the dossier triggered the probe; and that their sources told them that the FBI took the dossier seriously because it corroborated reports of collusion coming in from many other sources, something that has been confirmed by deep investigative reporting.

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