See no evil, hear no evil
BY TINA NGUYEN
FEBRUARY 26, 2018 6:13 PM
... Donald Trump drew a red line, telling The New York Times that if Mueller were to dig into his family's finances, he would consider it a "violation" of his privacy. "Look, this is about Russia," he said, calling his finances “extremely good” and his dealings with Russia "very trivial." Months later .. Mueller began to subpoena Trump’s financial lenders, specifically targeting Deutsche Bank ... "I don't see the link at this stage," Rep. Mike Conaway, the Republican heading the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation, told CNN ... "Deutsche Bank is a German bank — I don't see the nexus."
Deutsche .. recently agreed to pay $670 million in fines to settle allegations it used mirror trades to launder $10 billion out of Russia. But six Republican committee chairs involved in Congress’s various Russia investigations told CNN that they see no need to subpoena Trump’s tax records, bank records, or any sort of testimony into the president’s financials or those of his family ...
Trump’s history of shady business dealings is well known — the president's real-estate transactions with Russian billionaires and numerous bankruptcies raised red flags long before he was voted into office. But .. "see no evil, hear no evil" .. is .. now a familiar theme: Back in 2016, the president' affinity for Russia was so obvious that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly joked behind closed doors that Trump was being secretly paid by Vladimir Putin. (McCarthy’s jest hewed a little too close to the truth for comfort: House Speaker Paul Ryan immediately cut the conversation off and swore the room to secrecy.) ...
... "Every morning, I wake up in my office and scroll Twitter to see which tweets I will have to pretend that I didn't see later," Ryan joked during a gala in New York ... They have sidestepped lingering ethics questions about his Washington, D.C., hotel and other business properties that serve lobbyists, foreign diplomats, and other influence peddlers across the world. All of which makes sense, given the massive rubber stamp in Trump’s hand. Whether or not Trump colluded with Russians, wittingly or unwittingly, to win the 2016 election is of little consequence to the party that benefited — especially when Trump, a political neophyte with few concrete ideas of his own, is willing to sign almost any legislation that Congress puts on his desk. Earlier this year, amid a flurry of debate over immigration reform, the president instructed Republicans to send him a bill — any bill — and he would get it done ...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/republicans-dont-want-to-know-if-trump-colluded-with-russia
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