Jeff Flake is an ambitious man. His ambition is to sabotage President Trump, the Republican Party, and Trump voters by any means possible.
Few Americans understand the dynamics of fake Republicans in red states, where politically aspiring liberals often put an “R” after their names and run as pretend conservatives, knowing that is their only viable path to high office. Once safely elected, they feel free, like Senator Flake, to actively and sanctimoniously betray their voters.
So it should come as no surprise The Hill newspaper in March reported that Flake has “kept in touch” with former President Obama. Flake told David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist turned CNN host, that Obama called to check on him after the junior senator announced he would not run for reelection.
Flake hates President Trump like poison. He didn’t vote for him. He’s vied with Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) for the title of senator displaying the most open contempt for the president. In his announcement from the Senate floor that he would not be running for re-election, Senator Flake thundered he would “no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of Trump’s supposed “reckless, outrageous, and undignified” behavior—behavior that includes ending the Iran deal, pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, and bringing North Korea and China to the negotiating table.
Flake is proud of his friendship with Obama, a president who repeatedly ignored the constitutional limits of his power by using his “pen and phone” to enact executive orders on immigration, environmental regulations, and international agreements that he couldn’t get Congress to pass.
“The last night he was in the White House, the day before inauguration he (Obama) called just to say that he enjoyed working with me,” Flake told Axelrod. “And I certainly said the same.”
Perhaps that’s because Flake sides with the Left on cultural issues, on immigration, on the war on coal. Flake was a reliable ally for Obama on those causes and more. As the Conservative Review noted last year, “Flake served as a rudderless lord of his small fiefdom in the Senate, always operating within the policy universe set out by the Left. His only major accomplishment was joining the ‘Gang of 8’ open borders initiative.”
While Flake gives credence to the thinnest of unprovable allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, the self-styled “principled conservative” had no qualms about rubber-stamping Obama’s judicial nominees.
In Flake’s kissy-face interview with Axelrod, he expressed interest in running for president in 2020 as an independent. This is a seemingly quixotic gesture, until you realize it is just the thing to sabotage Arizona’s thin red majority and flip the state’s electoral votes to the Democrats.
On Thursday, Flake’s plan to help destroy Kavanaugh ran into two problems. The first was Kavanaugh’s electrifying self-defense. The second, and perhaps more important, was Senator Lindsey Graham’s message to his Republican colleagues: “If you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.” The South Carolinian made it impossible for Flake immediately to announce he’d be joining the Democrats against Kavanaugh.
So Flake plotted a mini-coup on Friday morning to snatch away Kavanaugh’s moral victory over the Democrats’ smear campaign. Flake met with Democrats and unrolled a last-minute intervention to delay the Kavanaugh vote and call in the FBI. In short, he legitimized the Democrats FBI talking point, a patent attempt to delay and further besmirch Kavanaugh’s honor.
Kavanaugh does not need any more FBI investigations. He’s already had six. When he served President Bush, he had the highest security clearance in the country, which gave him access to nuclear codes. To get that, the FBI had to comb through his entire life. Kavanaugh’s record is squeaky clean—cleaner, certainly, than that of the post-Obama FBI. His whole life attests to that.
Flake is doing “the most despicable thing” any of us have seen in politics in our lifetimes—using uncorroborated and implausible allegations from 36 years ago to launch scummy attacks against a decent man. No amount of rhetoric about “healing the country” can cover Flake’s perfidious deed.
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