This week in the Russia investigations: Why aren't the Democrats trying harder to exploit the Mueller investigation? And Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is set to stop by for a little visit to Congress.
The health care election
The president's onetime national security adviser, campaign chairman, campaign vice chairman, campaign foreign policy aide and others have pleaded guilty to federal charges.The president's son before Election Day in 2016 met with representatives of the same foreign government that employs roughly two dozen people charged by the Justice Department with attacking the election.It's a slam dunk for political opponents, right? Wrong.As midterm campaigning heats up and Democrats try to make their way back from the political wilderness, they are mostly not relying on the Russia imbroglio to make their case to voters.Although the subject comes up and the party has elected to attack President Trump and Republicans for what they call a "culture of corruption" — which broadly involves the Russia saga — the big political focus is elsewhere.Why?One reason is that Democrats want to program their messaging in affirmative ways, especially on health care, as NPR's Scott Detrow has reported. They want to run on it and in support of the Affordable Care Act, in addition to all the running against Trump they are doing.The president and Republican leaders in Congress are happy to meet Democrats on that playing field, as Trump did on Twitter, for example, on Thursday.Moreover, Trump is happy to talk about alleged collusion and alleged obstruction of justice — because he hasn't committed either one, he says. That's a "hoax," a "witch hunt," and the product of "derangement" by his political enemies.A report from the Wesleyan Media Project confirmed the focus of the midterm campaign in terms of ad spending: The 2018 elections are the health care elections, it found, to the exclusion of many other big issues and especially Russia.Per the report out this week:
Rosenstein returns
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is scheduled to conduct a long-delayed visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, albeit one slightly different from the trips he's made before.House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and House oversight committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., say they'll interview Rosenstein behind closed doors themselves, along with ranking members Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Elijah Cummings, D-Md. None of the rank-and-file members will be there.Rosenstein will swear an oath to tell the truth, and a court reporter will record the session, committee officials said. Once the transcript has been reviewed and cleared by the intelligence community "to avoid the public dissemination of classified or otherwise protected information," it will be "publicly available," they say.When? Good question. That may depend on Rosenstein's answers. If the deputy attorney general says something like, "yeah, I wore a wire, see, and I sent my G-Men to bug the president's bedroom and we've been wiretapping his phone," that may find its way into the press swiftly — ahead of Election Day in just a few weeks.If Rosenstein sticks to the public accounts he's given about his conversations early in his tenure at the Justice Department, the transcript might not make much of a splash.The deputy attorney general isn't the only witness meeting with members of Congress, even though both the House and Senate are in recess for the campaign season.Nellie Ohr, the woman who worked for the political intelligence firm that commissioned the Steele dossier — and who is married to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who kept in contact with Steele — visited Congress on Friday.And onetime junior Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos is due on the Hill on Thursday. He has been an aggressive booster of Trump's since his sentencing, and Papadopoulos' theorizing about how he was set up by the British or Australian governments will likely be music to the ears of Trump's allies in the House.
And briefly
Remember that wild Bloomberg Businessweek story that said that China had waged an industrial-scale hardware-based cyberattack against American government and business? That there were tiny spy chips in server hardware in use across the tech world? Apple, Amazon and others denied it at the time, and they continue to deny it stronger than ever. In fact, Apple wants Businessweek to retract the whole story. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.