As Donald Trump considers possible running mates, it’s been a few weeks since House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik made any grand gestures intended to impress the former president. As The New Republic noted, that changed yesterday.
Representative Elise Stefanik is mad at special counsel Jack Smith for doing his job and prosecuting Donald Trump. In an ironic move betraying a complete lack of self-recognition, Stefanik on Tuesday filed an ethics complaint against Smith for “illegal election interference.”
Yes, the New York congresswoman, rumored to be in contention for her party’s vice presidential nomination, filed a complaint against the special counsel with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, accusing Smith of trying to “rush” the prosecution of Trump’s federal election subversion case.
Stefanik, who almost certainly knows better, also issued a statement that referred to the pending criminal case as “illegal“ for reasons she failed to explain.
Of course, there’s no reason to believe officials at the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility will take the GOP lawmaker’s complaint seriously — because it’s not a serious complaint — though that hardly matters, since they’re not the intended audience anyway.
This was, and is, a stunt intended to raise eyebrows at Mar-a-Lago, not Main Justice.
Stefanik’s offensive against Smith comes just weeks after she publicly called on New York Judge Juan Merchan to recuse himself from Trump’s hush money criminal case.
Which came on the heels of the GOP lawmaker filing a formal complaint against New York Attorney General Letitia James over her fraud case against the former president.
Which came on the heels of Stefanik’s incoherent criticisms of a judge who’d just granted Team Trump’s request for a postponement in a civil case.
Which came on the heels of Stefanik claiming with a straight face that Trump hadn’t confused Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, even after everyone saw him do exactly that.
Which came on the heels of Stefanik echoing Trump’s rhetoric about Jan. 6 rioters being “hostages” — a claim that even some in her party were not comfortable with. Which came on the heels of Stefanik responding to Trump’s classified documents scandal by criticizing the National Archives, helping launch an effort to “expunge” Trump’s impeachments, and joining a partisan crusade against federal law enforcement. Which came on the heels of Stefanik filing an ethics complaint against the judge overseeing Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York and pressing the Justice Department to prosecute Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer who has since become a fierce critic of the former president. I continue to believe that no one should want to be vice president this badly. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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