WaPo Video

In all my years watching American politics, I’ve never seen anything like what’s going on with the Republican Party in the era of the Trump-thing. The entire party seems to have given in to the worst kind of paranoid conspiracy-mongering, and lately their targets haven’t been the usual liberal boogeymen like the media or Hollywood — but the federal government itself. Their tactics are very similar to those used by authoritarian governments throughout history, and this type of political bottom feeding never ends well.

There’s a concerted Republican effort underway to smear and discredit the FBI and the Justice Department in order to shield Donald Trump from accountability, as Greg Sargent lays out today: Trump and the great GOP abdication.

Watch the video above to see how all-encompassing this effort is — it’s taking place at every level of the GOP.

Today, I’m told, Sen. Mark Warner (Va.) — the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — will publicly say that classified information debunks the arguments reportedly made in the now-notorious secret memo by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), which bolsters the idea that the Russia investigation is a Deep-State Coup against Trump. Nunes has made this memo available to members of Congress, in what Democrats charge is a selective cherry-picking of intelligence designed to arm Republicans with talking points to discredit the Russia probe.

“Senator Warner will say publicly that unlike almost all of the 200 GOP congressmen who’ve seen the memo, he has actually read the underlying documents,” Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Warner, emailed me this morning. “He is confident that there was nothing improper like what this memo seems to allege.”