I suspect Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert thought they had come up with a clever little plan. They saw Harry Reid pull an adroit stunt last week and thought maybe they could turn the tables a bit. Instead the gang that can’t shoot straight pulled another Keystone Kops routine.
As I mentioned briefly yesterday, Frist and Hastert announced they wanted a formal congressional leak investigation — not into the Plame scandal, but into the leak to the Washington Post about “black sites,” the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. Politically, at least to Frist and Hastert, this might have seemed like a good idea.
This was a way for GOP leaders to prove that they take the leak of classified information seriously. It may have also been a way to put Dems on the spot: “You guys are worried about leaks? Fine, let’s investigate this one.” Maybe this stunt was even intended to blur the line a bit between the two controversies, muddling the message in the public’s mind.
But sometimes when a team is in a funk, everything goes wrong.
Almost immediately after the GOP leaders started talking about their alleged outrage over the “black sites” leak, one of their colleagues explained that it was probably a Republican senator who dished to the Post.
Another Republican, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, said that senators from his party might have given information to the Post. Lott told reporters that the existence of the prison system was discussed last week at the Republican policy luncheon on Capitol Hill, which was attended by Vice President Dick Cheney and held the day before the Post published its report.
“Information that was said in there, given out in there, did get into the newspaper,” Lott said. “I don’t know where else it came from…. It looked to me that at least one of those reports came right out of that room.”
Perhaps even more importantly, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained, Frist and Hastert were missing the forest for the trees.
The Republican leaders seemed to believe Dems would cower from a discussion about the leak. What they fail to understand is that Dems love the Frist/Hastert idea.
As Dear Leader would say, I think it’s a “faahbulous” idea to hold hearings into how the Washington Post found out that we have established an illegal gulag (yes, a gulag) in countries around the world where we are holding and torturing prisoners indefinitely and with impunity. I hope it creates headlines every single day for months as we explore this issue of how reporters found out that we are behaving in an illegal and immoral fashion along the lines of the Soviet Union. We need to get to the bottom of how such a thing happened and if it requires days and weeks of media coverage discussing how we torture and imprison people in foreign countries, so be it.
This Republican implosion is really becoming interesting to watch. These people lose their wits when they are forced to play defense. They think they are being clever and “turning the tables” on the Democrats by holding hearings into a leak but they apparently don’t understand that they are playing right into the Democratic narrative about Republican secrecy, lies and incompetence.
As Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) put it, investigating the source of the prison article is fine, as long as Congress also investigates the secret prisons themselves.
Think about this way: what are the points Dems have emphasized the last couple of weeks? Dangerous leaks, torture, a reckless Bush administration, and the need for congressional investigations. Guess which points the Frist/Hastert stunt reinforce?