Top Republican leaders in Congress ignored the details of Trump’s criminality and corruption outlined in the Mueller report, and instead mounted defenses of him and pushed for the country to effectively ignore Trump’s actions.
Coming in at more than 400 pages, the Mueller report detailed the repeated interactions between Trump’s presidential campaigns and Russians interfering in the election process with documented evidence.
The report also revealed the stomach-turning details of Trump’s attempts to impede the investigation using his presidential power.
None of this apparently matters to Republican leaders.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the highest-ranking Republican official in the United States, was tight-lipped about the report.
McConnell’s only public statement was a short press release thanking Attorney General William Barr for releasing the report to the public. McConnell did not point out how Barr had widely deceived the nation in his presentation and did not bother to address Trump’s actions.
“The nation is fortunate to have an experienced leader like Bill Barr in place,” he noted.
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) did even worse. Despite his role as Majority Whip in the Senate, he appeared to have no problems with the sitting president of the United States engaging in criminal acts.
Thune did not bother to issue a press release or even a tweet on the release of the Mueller report.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s sole public statement could have been written by Trump himself.
“Nothing we saw today changes the underlying results of the 22-month long Mueller investigation that ultimately found no collusion,” he said.
McCarthy claimed Democrats concerned by the details of the report and Trump’s assault on the rule of law were merely engaged in a search for “imaginary evidence.”
“IT IS TIME TO MOVE ON,” he pleaded in an all-caps tweet.
His second-in-command, Minority Whip Steve Scalise, parroted McCarthy and Trump in falsely claiming that the report had exonerated Trump of wrongdoing.
He said Democrats “ought to apologize” to America for raising concerns about Trump’s work with a hostile foreign power. Scalise also raised the specter of a congressional investigation based on right-wing conspiracy theories that insist there was no basis for the Trump investigation to begin with.
Even the Republican leaders tasked with holding up the rule of law had nothing of consequence to say about Trump’s actions.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is currently on a tour of Africa with Ivanka Trump. He took a break from his travels to tell reporters he was “not interested” in hearing from special counsel Robert Mueller through congressional testimony (House Democrats have asked Mueller to speak).
Graham was otherwise silent on the report.
Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the top-ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, insistedthat “accusations of criminal obstruction are unfounded,” despite the voluminous evidence to the contrary in the report.
Otherwise, Collins complained in tweets about coverage of the report and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler’s ongoing attempts to hold Trump accountable.
Over the first two years of Trump’s presidency, his Republican allies in Congress steadfastly refusedto do their jobs and uncover his criminality and corruption. Voters punished the party for that in the 2018 midterm elections and gave control of the House to Democrats.
Despite the rebuke from millions of voters, the responses from top Republican leaders show that nothing Trump does — even with hundreds of pages of evidence — will cause them to step away from the party line.
They have chosen loyalty and party over upholding the Constitution.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
