Last week, the Washington Post created a 90-minute wonder with a scoop: leaked audio from a meeting of House Republicans supposedly contained an admission from Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy that Vladimir Putin had paid off Donald Trump. It became painfully obvious that McCarthy and several Republicans were joking during this exchange, but at least for a brief period of time, it was hot news. It did leave another question, though — who was the leaker? Hugh Hewitt asked Paul Ryan about the whodunit this morning, and whether he believed the rumor that former Capitol Hill staffer-turned-presidential candidate Evan McMullin engineered it.
Ryan … didn’t exactly debunk the idea:
HH: Second story alleged that you’re worried about tape recordings of leadership meetings. True or false?
PR: Well, that was, it was, I’ve never seen anything like this. There was somebody who taped a meeting a year ago where our Majority Leader cracked a joke, and then they released the tape of that joke out just a few days ago. And that’s a pretty bizarre thing to happen, so obviously that’s a cause of concern of ours.
HH: Do you believe it was Evan McMullin?
PR: I’m not going to speculate on who that is. That’s the name most people, you know, you hear about.
McMullim is former CIA, so this may be standard operating procedure for spooks these days, under conditions where being caught with a wire would not be life threatening. The equipment is cheap enough online, assuming you don’t want to just load an app on your phone, for covert recording while making the phone appear off.
Still, it seems reckless to let himself be caught, or even suspected, so there may be more to this “leak” than meets the eye. Maybe it was done by McMullin with Ryan’s blessing, as part of a pre-planned GOP setup to further the Russian narrative against President Trump. Maybe McMullin accidently let someone have access to his files and they stole it. But it would seem self-destructive to release it.
It might also be possible they were bugged by a third party, either professional and part of a well-organized anti-Trump operation, or something less impressive. Whoever it was, everybody is playing the intel game. Whether somebody working for Soros turned on a Congressman’s phone covertly from a computer in a basement somewhere, whether somebody there was wired, or whether somebody left behind a $10 Chinese recorder hidden in a plant, it makes Trump’s accusation of his wires being tapped much more obviously credible.
What is interesting is Ryan has not filed a report with the Capital Police, and begun an illegal surveillance investigation. Given it could have been a hostile third party like Russia which did this, this is at least as important as Anthony Weiner’s wiener pic which triggered a Capital Police investigation into the hacking of his twitter and took him down. Whether this was criminal or not should be determined by the Police, especially since it is a matter of National Security. That would imply Ryan is not concerned because he knows who did it.
It does make you wonder if Donald Trump’s tweet about there being “tapes” of his conversations with Comey was a subtle jibe over the recording of interactions being prolific in DC these days. I am sure President Trump is at the point where he always assumes he is being tapped, as well he should.
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