Paul Ryan is actively helping Trump undermine the rule of law

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/paul-ryan-silent-partner-in-trumps-war-on-the-rule-of-law.html
Paul Ryan Is the Silent Partner in Trump’s War on the Rule of Law
By Jonathan Chait
January 25, 2018 1:01 pm

In early January, FBI director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with House Speaker Paul Ryan and asked him to rein in his attack dog, Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes, who also attended the meeting, had supposedly “recused” himself from the Trump-Russia investigation, but in fact was running an increasingly vicious counter-investigation against the Department of Justice in an attempt to defend the administration. Wray and Rosenstein worried that Nunes’s subpoenas were threatening to expose sensitive law-enforcement documents. But, CNN reported on January 4, “it became clear that Ryan wasn’t moved and the officials wouldn’t have his support if they proceeded to resist Nunes’ remaining highly classified requests.”

Since then, Nunes’s campaign against federal law enforcement has escalated. He has compiled a secret memo making wild allegations of conspiracies and even criminality against all of Trump’s legal antagonists. The entire conservative media infrastructure, goaded on by Trump himself, is foaming at the mouth to publish the Nunes memo. Democrats insist the memo is a distortion of the underlying intelligence regarding the FBI, but the Department of Justice also warns that publishing this underlying intelligence — which would be necessary to refute Nunes’ allegations — “would be extraordinarily reckless” and compromise national security.

A side effect of Nunes’s campaign to discredit Trump’s investigators is to threaten to burn down the credibility and effectiveness of federal law enforcement. Here is the point that is largely absent from this drama: This is all happening because Paul Ryan wants it to happen.

Ryan’s role in the Trump administration’s ongoing destruction of governing norms has been largely invisible, but it is vital. Ryan, of course, made his national reputation as a wonk-hero, Kevin Kline’s regular-guy accountant turned accidental president in Dave. That reputation has been tarnished by a number of intervening events, including the supposed deficit hawk’s shepherding of a massive deficit-increasing tax cut, but Ryan has managed to retain some of his original aura. Perhaps most important, even though he holds wide-ranging powers in his role as House Speaker, he is still treated like a fiscal policy specialist. He is therefore able to ignore Trump’s misdeeds, even when those that implicate him directly and require his active cooperation.