Well, Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham recommend prosecution of somebody in connection with Russian attempts to subvert American democracy. The person they recommend be prosecuted is Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence agent and author of the so-called Steele dossier. They claim that he supposedly lied to investigators about dissemination of information in the dossier to members of the news media.
The New York Times has an article up about it, which includes a link to a copy of the referral to DOJ. Clearly, to these “patriots,” it is a much worse thing to inform the media about a plot to subvert our democracy than it is to cooperate with a hostile foreign power in subverting our democracy.
I fear that we are well down the road to becoming Turkey or Russia. I have a Turkish-American friend who says that he doesn’t think Trump can accomplish what Erdogan did because our institutions are stronger than those in Turkey were when Erdogan undertook his purge of anybody who dared to oppose him. I told him our institutions might be stronger, but I just hoped they were ENOUGH stronger to resist Trump’s efforts to subvert anything that stood between him and dictatorial power. This development doesn’t increase my confidence