Are Republicans Already Beginning to Worry About the Judgment of History?

Democrats condemning GOP white washing - will history do likewise?

Yesterday, the Republican members of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee released a report finding that the committee had found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.  The report was released over the protests of Democrat members of the committee and after the Republican majority had refused to interview witnesses and/or review other evidence that might have led to a contrary finding.   Driving home I happened to catch statements of former RNC chair Michael Steele who suggested that history might be far less than kind to these Republicans.  Indeed, in my own mind - and I am a former Republican myself - the House Intelligence Committee Republicans opted to side with possible, if not likely, treason.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at some GOP members of the committee who seem to be trying to cover their despicable behinds.  Here are article excerpts:

The leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation seemed to back off Tuesday from the most surprising finding in the GOP’s report that Russia was not trying to help President Trump, as the panel’s top Democrat trashed the product as a political gift to the White House.

Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.) told reporters Tuesday that “it’s clear [Russian officials] were trying to hurt Hillary [Clinton]” by interfering in the 2016 election and that “everybody gets to make up their own mind whether they were trying to hurt Hillary, help Trump, it’s kind of glass half full, glass half empty.”

That equivalence stands in sharp contrast to the conclusions of a 150-page GOP-drafted report Conaway announced to the news media on Monday that concludes that the intelligence community “didn’t meet the standards” of proof necessary to determine that Russia meddled in the 2016 election with the aim of helping Trump.

His comments came after other panel Republicans, including Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.) gave interviews in which they stressed that there was evidence that Russia had tried to damage Clinton’s candidacy.

The report’s findings on Russia’s intentions in interfering is just one area of the document with which Democrats on the panel took issue Tuesday after being presented with it in the morning.

The panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who called the report “not a serious work,” said the document was proof that Republicans were willing only to “go through the motions of an investigation . . . to give the pretense of trying to find the truth.”

Schiff added that the report was “little more than another Nunes memo in long form,” . . . . Democrats accused Republicans of using the Nunes memo to undermine the Russia investigation — a charge they also applied to Tuesday’s GOP report.
 Schiff and other Democrats on the committee released a 22-page “status update” Tuesday night, listing the various witnesses, firms and documents the panel had declined to subpoena or otherwise examine, along with the reasons that each would be relevant to the investigation. It also lays out areas of inquiry that the minority members say the GOP abandoned by terminating the probe earlier than Democrats would have liked. Democratic committee members pledged to forge ahead with the investigation and eventually issue their own report, although they do not have the ability to subpoena witnesses and other information without the panel chairman’s buy-in.

They reserved special vitriol for the GOP’s decision not to more aggressively pursue uncooperative witnesses such as former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, whom Conaway had previously considered holding in contempt.

Schiff said. “This majority doesn’t want to know the answers, and it has set a precedent now that will affect future congresses’ ability to get answers from the executive.”

Like too many Republicans of today, German politicians in the late 1920's ands early 1930's sold their souls to Hitler and the Nazi Party for what they saw as short term advantage.  Long term they sold their souls and have been damned by history and left their descendants  bearing a burden of shame.   I truly do not understand the mindset that predominates within today's Republican Party.