Tuesday's CNN political panel couldn't help but wonder if the GOP is giving President Donald Trump cover on the Russia investigation.
Commentator David Gregory noted that he can't understand why President Donald Trump and the GOP are going this route, with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and his memo, swearing that Trump has done nothing wrong.
"Why do they keep looking like they have so much to hide?" Gregory asked Tuesday. "Why does the president reportedly threaten to fire [special prosecutor Bob] Mueller? He looks like he's hiding something. My first observation is this investigation ought to withstand scrutiny and criticism, that includes Mueller and the FBI and the dossier."
Gregory said that everyone should be able to get to the truth, yet this isn't that.
"What's disconcerting to me is I think some Republicans in all of this are using the same intellectual rigor they used in the Benghazi conspiracy mindset, which is not a lot of intellectual rigor and it's hurting the process and unfair and makes the president look worse," he said.
"New Day" co-host Chris Cuomo noted that Nunes, who authored the memo, hasn't even read the classified information that led to the memo.
"Lawmaker, after lawmaker, hasn't read the memo, they have read the memo but haven't read the supporting documents," Cuomo noted. "They're in a rush to get it out. How unusual."
Legal analysts Michael Zeldin agreed on the peculiarity of the memo and its release he called purely political.
"These guys really don't care about the underlying intelligence," he noted. "They want to make a report that says the [Christopher] Steele dossier is not to be credited because they are afraid of it being proven to be true because that sets out a relationship between the Russians and the Trumps that goes back a decade and sets the predicate for the relationship that forms the basis of the collusion theory."
For that reason, Zeldin thinks that the memo is nothing more than a distraction that is there to discredit the Steele dossier.
"That's why I don't think they care about the facts," Zeldin said. "They don't need to read the facts. They know what they want to say. They know what their narrative is and they're pushing it out. The reason they withheld the Democrat counter-report, they want their narrative out there first so they can sort of set -- if it was cement -- they want it to set and have a counter-narrative, but by then, they're hoping that there's already stuck."
Gregory noted that the president seems to "make the investigation worse and more intense around him because of actions he takes." He said to "forget all this nonsense with the politics over the memos. Why is the president acting this way? I get he feels it's unfair, but he acts in a way that makes it seem like he's done something wrong."
Zeldin agreed, saying that the GOP and the president are obsessed with the dossier and that report is the "heart of the money laundering allegations" and the heart of the theory around Russian collusion.
Cuomo said that the curious thing is the need for people like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) believe that the Democrats cooked up the entire conspiracy and that it's nothing more than political. Cuomo recalled the interview he did with Jordan Monday night, when he said that he hadn't read the memo but that he knows it's all true.
They're hanging their hats on the presumption that the Russian collusion investigation is the Benghazi of the left. It puts them in a difficult position if they're going all in on a conspiracy that turns out not to be true.
Watch the full conversation below:
