If there’s a competition in Republican circles to see who can come up with the most unfortunate response to Donald Trump’s new indictment, the senior senator from the great state of Florida has a submission that warrants attention.
Here, for example, was what Sen. Marco Rubio posted online, less than a day after special counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment was unsealed:
“Apparently it is now a crime to make statements challenging election results if a prosecutor decides those statements aren’t true. So when should we expect indictments of the democrat politicians who falsely claimed Russia hacked the 2016 election?”
Let’s unpack this, because it’s a classic example of a politician pushing foolish rhetoric that he even can’t seriously believe.
First, the idea that the former president was charged with “making statements challenging election results” is evidence of the apparent fact that Rubio complained about an indictment without reading it, which was unwise.
Second, for the Floridian to suggest that Trump’s bonkers conspiracy theories related to the election are merely at odds with the special counsel’s opinions — as opposed to reality — is plainly ridiculous.
Third, Rubio has become such a relentless partisan that he not only uses “Democrat” when he should use “Democratic,” the senator can no longer even bring himself to capitalize the proper noun.
But the truly amazing part of his missive was the senator trying to link together Trump’s election scandal and those who have the audacity to believe the Russia scandal. As Rubio characterized it, there’s an equivalence between the former president trying to overturn an election and seize illegitimate power, and those who “falsely” accused the Kremlin of targeting the U.S. elections in 2016 to benefit the Republican ticket.
If the former is considered a crime, the senator suggested, then perhaps the latter should be considered illegal, too.
What makes this so striking is not just the nonsensical nature of Rubio’s attempted point, but also the fact that Rubio, as much as any Republican politician anywhere, knows the truth.
After Russia launched an expansive and expensive covert military intelligence operation that targeted the U.S. political system in 2016, the Senate Intelligence Committee launched a lengthy and thorough investigation. That committee was chaired at the time by a gentleman by the name of Marco Rubio. The panel published its voluminous findings, which arrived at a variety of important conclusions, including the apparent fact that the Russian government “directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level.” While the committee didn’t find evidence of Russian attackers going so far as to change votes, congressional investigators did conclude that Moscow’s efforts “exploited the seams between federal authorities and capabilities, and protections for the states.” This, of course, was the same Senate panel that literally described a “direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services” as part of its official findings. This was not an obscure document unrelated to Rubio’s work on Capitol Hill; he was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the panel released its findings, which makes his latest rhetoric all the more difficult to explain.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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