Panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" blasted President Donald Trump and other Republican hypocrites for their reckless handling of classified information to protect the White House from a special counsel probe.
Host Joe Scarborough said the president and his GOP lackeys had a staggering double standard after criticizing Trump's Democratic rival -- who they continue to attack.
"The only thing that Hillary Clinton has to do with Donald Trump right now is the same Republicans that were castigating Hillary for being reckless with classified information, are being more reckless for ignoring the FBI director (and) ignoring the deputy attorney general," Scarborough said. "Paul Ryan is doing things that Hillary Clinton never approached."
House Republicans want to release a memo they say will expose FBI corruption and end the special counsel probe, although lawmakers who have seen the underlying evidence disagree -- and FBI director Chris Wray and deputy attorney Rod Rosenstein begged Trump's chief of staff not to declassify the memo.
"Gen. (John) Kelly was the head of the Department of Homeland Security before he became White House chief of staff," said MSNBC analyst John Heilemann. "It boggles the mind that he would hear this warning and not heed it, No. 1. No. 2, Rod Rosenstein was on a suicide mission yesterday."
Heilemann said the ice is thin under Rosenstein's feet, but he risked angering Trump even further by asking Kelly to stop the memo's release.
"In the long arc of history we'll look back on Rod Rosenstein and say he exhibited an extraordinary amount of personal and political courage to put himself in that position," he said.
Heilemann pointed out a pending inspector general's report may find wrongdoing by FBI agents during the investigations of Trump and Clinton during the campaign -- but Scarborough said those concerns were hardly new.
"For Trumpists right now who are pretending that the media didn't say there was a problem -- it's all we talked about," Scarborough said. "We criticized (then-FBI director James) Comey, we criticized (deputy FBI director Andrew) McCabe, we criticized them all. That doesn't mean you blow up an investigation when they're hot on the trail of finding out corruption in the executive branch."
MSNBC analyst Elise Jodan criticized Republicans for trusting House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes as an "oracle of truth," saying the panel's staffers mocked the former dairy farmer as "secret agent man" -- and Scarborough agreed.
"They've already busted him, for lying," Scarborough said. "They've already busted him being a courier, he's nothing but a courier for Donald Trump, holding that press conference, going down, grabbing the papers, coming back up. They've already busted him."
"Republicans are staking their credibility on a guy that, I'm sorry, I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw him," he added.
