Where is the Democratic senator who will play Howard Baker?
In the summer of 1974, the U.S. Senate held hearings to investigate what happened regarding the so-called "Watergate burglary." The operatives involved were Republicans and the media figures Democrats.
During the televised hearings, many senators spoke out, but one who stood out in particular was the Republican Senator Howard Baker. Despite the fact that Richard M. Nixon, his own party leader and the sitting president, was being investigated, Senator Baker asked tough questions of the witnesses and tried to discover what really happened. Famously, he asked, "What did the president know? And when did he know it?" In many ways, Baker played a statesmanlike role in the proceedings.
In the 2016 presidential campaign, there appears to be considerable evidence that the CIA and FBI, led by appointees of a Democrat president in conjunction with the Democrat candidate, spied on the Republican candidate. The FBI and CIA people involved have come out publicly and announced their partisanship. A small Republican media contingent (e.g., John Solomon, Sundance, Molly Hemingway, Kim Strassel, Dan Bongino, etc.) has doggedly investigated Spygate. But no Democrat media member has gone after the story.
An even more glaring aspect is that no Democrat in the Congress has stepped forward to say we need to investigate what happened and ask the tough questions. No Democrat is willing to play Howard Baker. No Democrat is willing to be the statesman, to say using the federal government's great powers to spy on a Republican campaign is wrong and should not happen in a democracy.
This is a disappointing lack of moral courage on the part of the Democratic Party as a whole, when no one in their media or among the party's elected officeholders has stepped forward to say the FBI and CIA should not work with the Democrat candidate to defeat the Republican candidate.