Greg Sargent at the Post:

President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are running a systematic campaign of harassment and disruption directed at legitimate law enforcement activity being conducted on behalf of the American people — with the active goal of protecting Trump and his cronies from accountability and denying the public the full truth about a hostile foreign power’s effort to corrupt our democracy.

They call it “transparency” – which is idiotic, because “transparency” about ongoing investigations is not a thing. Sargent says this move will probably blow up in Trump’s face. I sure hope so.

Beyond this, the release is a remarkably brazen abuse of power. As national security expert David Kris notes, Trump is overruling national security professionals who wanted to keep certain portions secret to protect sources and methods — not for purposes of “transparency” in the “national interest,” but because he believes it will serve his own “self interest,” as a “subject” of this investigation.

That’s why I want to see it when it blows up in his face.

Genuine transparency is generally a laudable goal, and Trump, of course, has the authority to do these things, but his intent is what matters here. Trump is placing his own personal interests before those of the country, rendering this an abuse of that authority, under the guise of phony, selective, cherry-picked transparency. This is also a massive abuse of the public trust by his GOP allies. The whole point of legitimate oversight is to bolster public confidence in law enforcement, given the awesome powers it wields, but this is fake oversight designed to weaken public confidence in it — solely to serve Trump’s political needs.

The big problem we face is that, regardless of the facts, these situations allow Trump and his allies to exploit deep structural imbalances in our discourse and political media. Even if the new release debunks Trumpworld’s narrative, they will lie relentlessly in bad faith to the contrary, and madly cherry-pick from the new information to make their case. And they can count on assistance from a massive right-wing media infrastructure that will faithfully blare forth this narrative — even as the major news organizations adopt a much more careful approach that treats the interpretation of the new information as a matter for legitimate dispute, thus putting good-faith analysis and bad-faith propaganda on equal footing.

Rinse, repeat.