House and Senate Republicans have been tying themselves in knots trying to defend Trump after his newest indictments revealed his extraordinary efforts to hide highly classified nuclear and national security documents inside his Mar-a-Lago club even as government officials were trying to get them back. But there’s not much for Trump’s defenders to rally around, given that prosecutors have a tape of Trump literally showing off one of the classified documents because he thought it’d score him points in a petty political fight, and so “trying to defend Trump” is competing with “sprinting away from reporters with Josh Hawley-like grace” when Republicans have to decide whether to even acknowledge the charges against him.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley might have topped all the others. Capitol Hill reporter Joe Perticone reports that Grassley “tells me he hasn’t read the indictment because he’s ‘not a legal analyst.'”
Yes, no legal mumbo-jumbo for Grassley here. Not for Sen. Chuck Grassley, the (checks notes) previous Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Perticone also reports that Joni Ernst, Steve Daines, and Deb Fischer also claim they haven’t read the newest indictment of the last Republican president of the United States, which is puzzling because it’s a very quick read, something that can easily be skimmed in the span of a half hour, and you would think that Senate Republicans still willing to stick their neck out to defend Trump after two impeachments, and an attempted violent coup, and a jury confirmation of sexual assault might want to at least glance at the indictment to learn why Donald now faces Espionage Act charges as well.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, by contrast, says he hasn’t “read it all the way through. I read a lot of portions of it, though,” which is considerably more than ex-Judiciary chair Grassley could muster, and McCarthy, if you haven’t noticed, has a hell of a lot more on his plate these days, what with a good chunk of his own caucus willing to sabotage their entire party agenda for the sake of squeezing a few more drops of blood out of him.
McCarthy may have only skimmed the indictment, of course, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t willing to make a total ass of himself on Trump’s behalf. He’s the one who solemnly noted that at least “a bathroom door locks,” which sent much of the political internet into spasms of giggles, and then even more giggles as a handful of reporters tried to take the big goof seriously.
A twice-impeached, twice-indicted, sedition-promoting, hoax-pushing former “president” of the United States was caught red-handed hoarding national defense documents in a ballroom, bathroom, and poolside storage room at his private for-profit resort, and the best McCarthy can do is note that one of those three locations is technically sort of locked, some of the time, specifically when Trump or anyone else with access was attempting to poop.
There are worse takes, of course. Sen. Lindsey Graham manages to be terrible at this every day, all the time, and is currently waffling between noting that Trump “believes” he had the right to put classified national defense secrets in his chandeliered pooproom and, previously, offering the defense that well it’s not like Trump was in league with foreign spies so shut up.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) picked up the argument Sunday. “Espionage charges are absolutely ridiculous. Whether you like Trump or not, he did not commit espionage,” Graham said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “He did not disseminate, leak or provide information to a foreign power or to a news organization to damage this country. He is not a spy. He’s overcharged.”
Oh, Lindsey. For starters, the indictment doesn’t charge Trump with disseminating the information, it only charges him with retaining it and attempting to conceal it when federal officials asked for it back—this is a case where Graham might have done himself some good to read the indictment before appearing on Sunday shows to once again make an ass of himself.
But Graham may want to put a pin in that one, because while federal prosecutors are not currently charging Trump with disseminating the documents to a foreign power, even we in the public now know that 1.) Trump had no compunctions against showing the documents to supplicants ranging from aides and ghostwriters to Kid Rock, for some reason, and 2.) not all of the classified documents Trump is believed to have made off yet have been found, including the one he was recorded waving around, and (3) Donald Trump and his family have done very well for themselves in their new partnerships with Saudi Arabian royalty, representatives of which have been in the same Bedminster, New Jersey, club that Trump is now known to have spirited some portion of the classified docs off to.
Sen. Marco Rubio took up the same line, whining that 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.” Again, put a pin in that one. That is a very, very narrow limb to climb out on, when you’re talking about a money-obsessed lifetime petty crook who just proved himself willing to overthrow the government rather than admit failure on his part. Do we really think—are we really quite sure—that he did not do that?
We’ll see where this goes from here, but we can count on House and Senate Republicans to humiliate themselves over and over again on Trump’s behalf before this is over. The short of it is that Trump has access to all of the party’s deplorables, voters who themselves are quite fond of sedition and think that well maybe there should be violence to clean out their political enemies so that gun-owning malcontents can rule what’s left, and nearly every Republican in the party has decided they need to support Trump through extortion, sedition, and even espionage if the alternative is losing those votes.
It will get worse. Count on it. There’s no chance prosecutors are already telling us everything investigators have learned about Trump’s hoard of classified documents—and there are still more indictments waiting in the wings.
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We talk about the field of Republicans willing to go up against the MAGA monster that is Trump. It’s a veritable who cares of the Republican Party, but it is also indicative of the rot inside of the conservative world.
