Thursday, March 21, 2019

And My Repug Congressman is a Putin-fellating Traitor

Speaking of I Got Mine Fuck You billionaires, Thomas Massie is far worse than just a selfish, piece of shit libertarian.

He's playing treason with the trumpies.

For most of the last decade, former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) held the title of the most Kremlin-friendly member of the House of Representatives. But with Rohrabacher’s loss in his reelection bid last year, a new contender has laid claim to the crown.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), first elected to represent Kentucky’s 4th District in 2012, may not be as bombastic as Rohrabacher or have as many colorful anecdotes about drunkenly arm-wrestling Russian President Vladimir Putin as the former California congressman. But he’s distinguished himself in the House for pushing and voting for Russia-friendly measures, time and again.

Massie did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for an interview.

Widely considered one of the most prominent libertarian members of Congress, the Kentucky congressman made news last month as one of the few Republicans to vote against President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration, describing Trump’s national emergency plans as “overreach.” 

But despite his recent vote against the president’s pet project, Massie has taken plenty of opportunities to lavish praise on Trump, from backing the president’s abrupt foreign policy decisions — including when Trump unexpectedly announced American troops would be leaving Syria — to claiming that Trump “probably saved the GOP from itself” when the president signed the 2017 tax bill.

Most notably, Massie has taken steps to slow criticism of Russia, as well as deflect questions about the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, along the way.

Massie has regurgitated many of the conspiracy theories Trump has pushed to discredit the ongoing Mueller investigation. He has repeated the baseless claim that the FBI secretly spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign, playing up the evidence-free notion that the campaign’s attempts at Russian collusion were, in reality, traps laid by the Obama administration.

There’s no evidence the Obama administration attempted to trick the Trump campaign into colluding with Russian agents, but it’s a line Trump routinely pushes to distract from questions about his own ties with Russia. In an editorial following Massie’s statement, the Lexington Herald Leader wrote that Massie’s “feverish parroting of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims” was “disturbing.”

It’s unclear whether Massie believes Russia interfered in the 2016 election, even though America’s own intelligence community, along with any number of journalists and academics, has thoroughly established those interference efforts.

In a 2017 survey of Cincinnati-area politicians, The Cincinnati Enquirer asked whether they accepted the intelligence community’s assessment that Russian hackers stole Democratic emails in order to aid Trump’s election. According to the Enquirer, Massie “did not directly answer,” but later in the interview claimed the investigation into Russia’s hacking was “a political effort to de-legitimize the incoming administration,” a line often peddled by the president himself.
Read the whole disgusting thing.

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