Republicans Contort Themselves In New Ways To Defend Trump

WASHINGTON — Republican lawmakers are finding novel ways to defend Donald Trump after he became the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges by the federal government that he once oversaw.

Trump is accused of violating a section of the Espionage Act, making false statements and engaging in a conspiracy to obstruct justice after he refused to hand over classified information pertaining to America’s national secrets. According to the explosive indictment, Trump hoarded boxes of classified documents in a bathroom at his ritzy Florida estate and showed some of them off to guests.

Trump’s own former attorney general, William Barr, has called the charges “damning,” while former national security adviser John Bolton called them “devastating,” and even one of Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, said her former boss was “incredibly reckless with our national security.”

But to Trump’s top defenders on Capitol Hill, the whole thing is much ado about nothing.

“I don’t know. Is it a good picture to have boxes in a garage that opens up all the time? A bathroom door locks,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters on Monday, comparing Trump’s case to that of President Joe Biden, who had classified documents stored in the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware, home.

Biden returned the documents in question, whereas Trump allegedly sought to prevent the return of classified material belonging to the U.S. government, even though he was served with a federal subpoena.

Over on the other side of the Capitol, two top Senate Republicans who were very critical of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information in 2016 defended Trump’s actions and downplayed the national security implications of his refusal to return top secrets.

“There’s no allegation that there was harm done to the national security,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday in an interview on CBS. “There’s no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked to somebody else or that anybody got access to it.”

In 2016, Rubio said Clinton’s private email server made classified information “vulnerable to theft and exploitation by America’s enemies.” He said Clinton’s actions were “grossly negligent, damaged national security and put lives at risk.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, took issue with the fact that Trump is charged with violating a section of the Espionage Act.

“Donald Trump, you may hate his guts, but he is not a spy. He did not commit espionage. What he did is very similar in my view to what Hillary Clinton did,” Graham said Sunday in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

The allegations against Trump are dramatically different from the potential charges considered against Biden, Clinton or former Vice President Mike Pence. Biden and Pence immediately alerted the government when documents were discovered in their possession. They both cooperated with investigators, allowing broad searches of their properties.

Trump was caught on tape admitting that he held classified documents and showing them off to people without proper security clearances.

“I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look … This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information,” Trump acknowledged in a 2021 meeting, according to CNN.

Most Republican lawmakers avoided wading into the details of Trump’s indictment, opting instead to complain about how Trump had been charged but Clinton had not. But a few GOP senators did express concern about the charges on Monday.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, called the indictment “very serious.”

“What I would hope is what others have done, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or anybody else, wouldn’t become the standard of behavior for Republican leaders,” added the South Dakota senator, who has endorsed his fellow colleague Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the 2024 presidential race.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the charges against Trump are “not good,” while Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) went a step further by calling them “pretty damning.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) noted that Trump’s legal troubles likely could have been avoided had he simply turned the classified documents over when asked.

“I’m increasingly angry the more I think about it,” Romney said. “The country is going through angst and turmoil, and that could have been avoided if President Trump had just turned in the documents; he wouldn’t have been indicted.”

“Why? What purpose would you have for doing that?“ he added of Trump’s actions.