2023-08-03 06:52:33
WASHINGTON (AP) — When Senate Leader Mitch McConnell rose to announce his vote to acquit Donald Trump in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol Hill impeachment trial, the Republican assured the public that the former president would have his day in court
“She hasn’t gotten away with anything yet, yet,” McConnell promised.
“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from accountability to any of them.”
But as Trump prepared to appear Thursday on federal charges that he orchestrated an unprecedented effort to overturn the 2020 election victory of incumbent President Joe Biden, the Republican frontrunner for the White House is not facing such grim warnings or recriminations. from his fellow party members.
It is a thunderous silence that draws attention. And meanwhile, the former president opens a wide lead over the other Republican presidential hopefuls. Those who stood up to Trump have disappeared. Instead, the party the tycoon leads has basically given up criticizing his actions, countering his impulses, or placing limits on his growing power.
Authoritarian academics warn that it is a classic example of a democracy in decline.
“He will do it once more,” claimed a new ad from the Republican Responsibility Project, an activist group. “Unless I face consequences.”
In indicting Trump, the Justice Department offered new details regarding the extent to which the defeated president resorted to an elaborate plan to reverse Biden’s victory, culminating in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, an insider attack like no other. in United States history.
Most members of Congress experienced firsthand what happened on January 6. Some barricaded the House doors, others fled to safety as thousands of Trump supporters laid siege.
Republican leader Kevin McCarthy called it his “saddest day” in Congress at the time, saying Trump “bears responsibility” for what happened.
After the 45-page indictment was released Tuesday night, McCarthy, who is now Speaker of the House, had a different reaction. He called it “the Justice Department’s attempt to distract from the news and attack the front-runner for the Republican nomination, President Trump.”
The change among the Republican congressmen was rapid for some, unequivocal for others and now, that Trump tries to return to the White House, practically complete.
Republicans who once challenged Trump, such as former Rep. Liz Cheney, have been ousted by voters or forced into early retirement. Those who remain, like Senator Mitt Romney, are often harassed and criticized by Trump in humiliating public statements.
Few remain of the 10 Republican representatives who voted to impeach Trump for the insurrection on Capitol Hill, as well as the handful of senators who voted to convict him.
Instead, congressional Republicans are focused on investigating Biden and his son, Hunter, over the family’s finances. Also in removing resources from the Department of Justice and reviewing the account of what happened on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to clean Trump’s record.
A top Trump ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is also close to McCarthy, said she would work to defund the office of special investigator Jack Smith during fall budget negotiations. She also wants to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Republicans describe the charges once morest Trump as an “instrumentalization” of the federal government once morest their party leader, an extension of the Justice Department’s investigation into the 2016 election and Trump’s first impeachment trial for his pressure on Ukraine to find damaging information regarding Biden, rather than the result of a year-long investigation by the department into the president’s role in the January 6 insurrection.
Greene said he would not stand by as the administration “politically goes following” Trump.
McCarthy is considering impeaching Biden as Republicans work to counter Trump’s growing legal troubles with the House’s fledgling investigation into the Biden family’s finances. Some Republicans are reviewing what happened on January 6 and suggest that those involved were mere “tourists.”
Five people died in the January 6 attack and its followingmath, including Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot to death by police as she tried to enter a room next to the House of Representatives. More than 1,000 people have been prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Some of them face serious sentences, such as members of extremist groups convicted of sedition.
In their document, the prosecution showed how Trump’s efforts began in the weeks following the 2020 election. According to prosecutors, he recruited officials from seven states where he had lost to send fake voter certificates to Congress stating that he had actually won on their papers. state.
Trump summoned thousands of supporters to Washington on January 6 knowing they would be “angry,” according to the legal document. His attempt to thwart Biden’s victory continued even in the hours following his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Special Investigator Smith wrote that Trump “attacked a critical function of the United States federal government: the national process of collecting, counting, and certifying presidential election results.”
It is a “foundational piece of the democratic process in the United States, and until 2021 it had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.”
It is the third case opened once morest the former president, all historic because no other president of the United States has faced criminal charges. Trump was earlier accused by Smith of hoarding classified documents and refusing to return them. And he faces charges in New York for payments he made during the 2016 campaign to silence a porn actress.
At a rally last weekend, Trump claimed he was exercising his right to free speech when he questioned the 2020 election results, an argument echoed by Republican congressmen when they denounce being silenced and censored.
In the document to prosecute him, the accusation indicates that Trump had the right to challenge the results. But he claims Trump repeated his claims knowing they were false in order to give them legitimacy, “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public confidence in the conduct of the election.”
At the time, McConnell took a similar view.
“The issue is not just the president’s outrageous words on January 6,” McConnell said ahead of the Senate vote that cleared Trump of the impeachment insurrection charge.
“It was the whole manufactured atmosphere of impending catastrophe, the myths – myths – getting crazier regarding a big opposing election victory being somehow stolen in a secret coup.”
“The leader of the free world,” McConnell said, “cannot spend weeks thundering that dark forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
This week, McConnell was silent.
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