Republicans wriggle into new ways to defend Trump

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

Trump is charged with violating a section of the Espionage Act, making false statements and participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice after refusing to hand over classified information related to US national secrets. According to the explosive indictment, Trump piled up boxes of classified documents in a bathroom at his lavish Florida estate and showed some of them to guests.

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

But for Trump’s main supporters on Capitol Hill, the whole affair is much ado about nothing.

“I don’t know. Is it a good image to have boxes in a garage that are being opened all the time? A bathroom door is being closed,” 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 home in Wilmington, Delaware.

Biden returned the documents in question, while Trump allegedly tried to prevent the return of classified material belonging to the US government, despite receiving a federal subpoena.

On the other side of the Capitol, two top Senate Republicans who were highly 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 secrets. high level.

“There is no allegation that national security has been harmed,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Monday in an interview at CBS. “There is no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked to someone else or that anyone had access to it.”

In 2016 Blonde saying Clinton’s private email server made classified information “vulnerable to theft and exploitation by enemies of the United States.” He said Clinton’s actions were “grossly negligent, damaged national security and put lives in danger.”

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

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

The accusations against Trump are dramatically different of possible charges being considered against Biden, Clinton or former Vice President Mike Pence. Biden and Pence immediately alerted the government when documents were discovered in their possession. Both cooperated with investigators, allowing extensive searches of their properties.

Trump was recorded admitting to having classified documents and showing them to people without proper security clearances.

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

Most Republican lawmakers avoided delving into the details of Trump’s impeachment, instead complaining about how they had impeached Trump but not Clinton. But some Republican senators raised concerns about the charges on Monday.

Sen. John Thune (RS.D.), the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, called the allegation “very serious.”

“What I hope is that what others have done, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or anyone else, doesn’t become the standard of behavior for Republican leaders,” added the South Dakota senator, who backed his colleague. colleague, Sen. Tim Scott (RS.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, calling them “pretty damning.”

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

“I get angrier the more I think about it,” Romney said. “The country is in anguish and confusion, and that could have been avoided if President Trump had turned over the documents; he would not have been charged.”

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