Jonathan Chait: ‘U.S. Intelligence Says Republicans Are Working with Russia to Re-elect Trump’

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From New York magazine:

The Russians have given Republicans stolen tapes of secret conversations [Joe] Biden held with Ukrainians during his tenure as vice-president, and pro-Trump media outlets have hyped up the material, but nothing they have is inconsistent with the narrative that mainstream news organizations found. Biden was working to clean up Ukraine. 

Senate Republicans tried to be cagey about their activities. After pro-Russian Ukrainians said they’d passed materials on to Republican officials, a [Ron] Johnson staffer told NBC News in July that it was “‘false’ the committee has received any ‘oppo,’ or opposition research, without responding directly to whether that covers any materials from foreign sources.”

The Washington Post reported that Homeland Security Committee chairman Ron Johnson received secret documents from Ukrainians. And former [Rudolph] Giuliani associate Lev Parnas has confessed to putting Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and perhaps Trump’s most energetic defender on all things Russia, in touch with one of the Ukrainians releasing documents in the United States.

There is hardly any secret to what they’re up to. Johnson says he plans to release his report on Biden in September. It hardly matters if the information Russia gives him actually substantiates his allegations, or even whether it is authentic. The obvious plan is to splash some headlines into news screens in the heat of the campaign that seem to connect Biden to some kind of wrongdoing.

In reality, it is not a scandal about Biden at all. It’s a scandal about Republican co-operation with a Russian propaganda campaign.

Read the full article.