If Congressman Goodllatte took (for him) a critical view of President Trump’s disgraceful performance at the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, he has wasted little time scurrying back into line with the White House.

A July 23 editorial in The Washington Post provides details:

The Justice Department on Saturday released the warrant applications that investigators submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court asking for permission to surveil former Trump adviser Carter Page. Mr. Trump and his enablers have made the documents central to their claims of FBI bias in its conduct of the Russia probe. In fact, the documents show that the investigative process was sound and the Republican narrative is paranoid, cynical or both.

Participating in the degradation on Sunday was House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who insisted that “there is a serious problem with the FBI” presenting a warrant application that, he claimed, was based on the so-called Steele dossier, a collection of mostly unverified reports about the behavior of Mr. Trump and his associates. As he echoed this line, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said “the warrant, the FISA warrant process needs to be looked at closely by Congress.”

Mr. Goodlatte is a key overseer of the nation’s legal affairs. Mr. Graham served in the U.S. Air Force JAG Corps. Both should know better than to assist in the trashing of a legitimate federal law enforcement operation.

Goodlatte’s persistent efforts to undercut the FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign are not news to readers of this blog. But at least one Republican with a genuine commitment to the truth has a different take:

“You have an individual here who has openly bragged about his ties to Russia,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said of Mr. Page. “And the FBI’s job is to protect this country from threats. . . . So they look at all this information. They say: We have a guy here who’s always in Russia, brags about Russia, and we have reason to believe — and they list those reasons — why this is someone we should be watching. And they followed the legal process by which to do so.”

… How many Republicans will continue to abet this wanton attack on the Justice Department and the judiciary — on American democracy?

No matter how many, it appears Goodlatte will be among them.

Even though he can’t bring himself to mention Donald Trump by name, this is (as best I recall) Congressman Goodlatte’s first public criticism of the president since the 2016 election.

Watch as Congressman Goodlatte makes a fool of himself with his ultra-partisan badgering of FBI official Peter Strzok at a joint hearing of the House Judiciary Committee (which he chairs) and the House Intelligence Committee.

Goodlatte threatened Strzok with a contempt citation after he declined to answer a question because FBI lawyers had instructed him not to answer any questions about the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 US election.

For months Goodlatte has been on a crusade to portray Strzok as part of an anti-Trump “conspiracy” at the FBI– despite solid evidence to the contrary.

Anyone who thought Goodlatte, once he announced his retirement from Congress, would feel less obligated to take Donald Trump’s side at every opportunity clearly overestimated the integrity of the congressman.