Former President Donald Trump drew defense from an unlikely source this week on the day of his arraignment.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the only Republican in the upper chamber to back Trump’s impeachment twice, condemned the indictment by a Manhattan prosecutor as an “overreach” that “sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents.”
“I believe President Trump’s character and conduct make him unfit for office,” Romney said in a statement. “Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda.”
Meanwhile, it’s been almost 48 hours, yet the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has said nothing.
Trump was charged last Thursday over hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought new life to the case after prosecutors previously refused to press charges. After this week unsealing the 34-count felony indictment, which altogether carries a maximum 136-year prison sentence, prosecutors revealed they were pursuing a novel legal theory regarding alleged falsifying of business records for the purpose of influencing an election.
“Bragg has done nothing more than replicated the same flawed theory dozens of times,” wrote George Washington Law Professor Jonathan Turley. “This is where math and the law meet. If you multiply any number by zero, it is still zero.”
The case is so weak, even a dozen liberal law professors and Trump antagonists called the prosecution a dead end.
[RELATED COVERAGE: Alvin Bragg’s Trump Indictment Is Even More Pathetic And Partisan Than We Could Have Imagined]
The partisan charges levied against the chief political opponent of current President Joe Biden were egregious enough to draw condemnation from the one GOP lawmaker who twice supported Trump’s criminal conviction. But despite the historic transition of the United States into a banana republic, the leading Republican in the upper chamber has remained silent on the 2024 GOP presidential front-runner’s political persecution. McConnell said nothing upon news of the indictment last Thursday and nothing when Trump was arraigned on Tuesday.
In contrast, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put out a statement demanding that Republican committees investigate the prosecution moments after news of an imminent arrest. They have, and so far have discovered Bragg used federal funds in the New York City probe. House lawmakers are now debating whether to subpoena the Manhattan D.A.’s office, including Bragg himself.
A similar episode of McConnell’s negligence happened last month when Fox News aired blockbuster footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” In March, Carlson presented his team’s findings of a weeks-long review of over 40,000 hours of surveillance footage released to the program by McCarthy. The Jan. 6 tapes undermined Democrats’ manufactured narratives about the riot being a “deadly insurrection.”
McConnell wasn’t just absent amid the ensuing media frenzy. He also led a chorus of GOP conference members to condemn McCarthy and Fox News.
“With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on Jan. 6,” McConnell told reporters.” Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger sent a memo to his department hours earlier that lambasted Carlson’s coverage as “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions.”
[READ: Everything You Need To Know About Tucker Carlson’s J6 Tapes]
The Kentucky lawmaker survived a challenge to his perch as GOP Senate chief in November after mismanagement of the fall midterms. While pulling scarce dollars from competitive Senate races in Arizona and New Hampshire for GOP candidates that opposed him, McConnell’s political action committee funded Alaska incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski — who faced a more conservative Republican. Despite sabotaging chances for a Republican majority to instead maintain a conference he could control, McConnell won his bid for Senate GOP leader when just 10 lawmakers defected.
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