Add House Speaker Paul Ryan to the list of Republicans who don’t want to talk about FBI Director James Comey’s testimony on Russian interference in the 2016 elections. He, like Fox News, is going on the hope that if he acts like there’s nothing to see, people won’t see anything.
"I don’t think we learned anything new yesterday with Comey's testimony," Ryan said at a press briefing.
Well, you as speaker of the House may not have learned anything, because maybe you knew all along that Trump’s campaign was under investigation for its ties to Russia. But the general consensus from people not frantically trying to spin this into nothing is that “we” did learn something new.
"It is very clear that we’ve seen no evidence and have been presented with no evidence that Donald Trump or his staff were involved in this with the Russians," he said.
But again, “we”—if by “we” he means “voters who are not top elected officials”—have not seen all the evidence that exists, and Republicans are working hard to make sure we don’t. Ryan’s job here is to try to normalize the situation so that voters don’t ask too many more questions or push to get those questions answered. He’s working hard at it, but the reality that most voters learned from Comey’s testimony that the president of the United States and his inner circle are under investigation for possibly colluding with a foreign government’s effort to undermine American democracy definitely makes the task of claiming that “I don’t think we learned anything new” a lot more difficult.