It would seem obligatory - patriotic, even - for our elected officials to weigh in on the Trump Administration's novel approach to foreign relations. But the one congressional representative from New Jersey in position to help illuminate the electorate and steer the country through the labyrinth ahead is curiously mute.
US Rep Frank LoBiondo. (Saed Hindash/The Star-Ledger)
Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-2nd Dist.) is a senior member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, one of many panels that have spit the bit since the New York Times reported on "extensive" contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence during the campaign, when U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia was cheating on Trump's behalf.
The chairman of that committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), won't guarantee that it will probe former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn or anyone else in the administration because "it just seems like there's a lot of nothing there."
LoBiondo's constituents deserve to know whether he shares Nunes's belief that "the big problem" is that "you have an American citizen who had his phone calls recorded."
It's unclear whether Nunes is habitually obtuse, but it helps to remember that GOP-dominated Congress didn't care much about Hillary Clinton's privacy when various committees decided that they could not rest until they locked her up.
LoBiondo's committee apparently believes oversight should apply mostly to presidents of the opposite party, and that Flynn is a victim here - so it's likely to investigate the leaks, not the fact that members of this administration may have compromised our national security and conspired to fix an election with an adversarial government.
LoBiondo won't say whether he would have preferred that there were no leaks, so that Americans remain oblivious of the Flynn-Russia link. He will not say whether he supports a non-partisan commission. And he will not say whether he finds revelations of Russian meddling in our election a serious problem.
New Jerseyans deserve to know all that, and they'd probably prefer their representative and his colleagues to assert their Article 1 authority, rather than cower in fear of getting buried under a morning tweetstorm.
Yet this is the trend among House Republicans, who are deaf to the alarm bell sounded by the likes of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) won't use the House Oversight Committee, our government's chief watchdog, to probe Trump. Instead, he is probing the Centers for Disease Control's $800,000 contract with PBS to produce a PSA about Zika starring Sid the Science Kid. No wonder committee member Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-10th Dist.) fears it has become "the Administration's satellite staff in Congress."
The House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), has stonewalled attempts by Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-9th) to use that committee's authority to review Trump's tax documents. Brady says those remain locked away, because, he asks, "what prevents Congress from doing the same to average Americans?"
The absence of treason allegations, is our guess.
As LoBiondo said of the intel community during a WPG radio backrub last month, "Politics is never far from anything here, but in certain areas, it has to be completely removed."
This is one of those areas.
Former Attorney General Sally Yates told the Trump White House that she believed Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. A Pentagon official told the Observer that "since January 20, we assumed that the Kremlin has ears" inside the Situation Room. The Wall St. Journal reported Wednesday that our spies withhold intelligence from Trump because of this Russian symbiosis.
LoBiondo needs to explain why his committee seems indifferent to this administration's relationship with Vladimir Putin. He needs to explain why he doesn't treat this as a national security emergency.
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If residents of N.J.'s Second Congressional District want to ask Rep. Frank LoBiondo how he views the role of the House Select Committee on Intelligence in a Flynn-Russia probe, they should drop him a line at his Mays Landing office (800-471-4450 or 609-625-5008) or his Washington office (202-225-6572)
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