As Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago scandal intensifies, and the available evidence paints a damaging picture of the former president’s alleged misconduct, some of his Republican allies appear a little nervous. That’s understandable: They’re running out of talking points.
And so, some in the GOP are recycling old ones. Here, for example, was Republican Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas on Fox News this morning:
“No one trusts the FBI or the DOJ anymore. I don’t trust them any further than I can throw that entire building…. Who knows what they got out of [Mar-a-Lago]? I don’t trust these people at all. They came in; they spent nine hours in there; they walked in with backpacks; they kicked out the president’s lawyers and Secret Service agents. Who knows — in my opinion, I’m just going to say, if they told me that they found something, I wouldn’t know that they actually found it there or if they just said they found it there.”
Around the same time, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s Republican governor, pushed a similar line:
“What was in those documents and folders? Do you know? We deserve to know, and I don’t know if the DOJ and FBI can be trusted to tell us what was in there. That’s the thing. You can see folders and big words on the — do we know that is really what President Trump brought to his home? Do we know that he put them there?”
The governor, whose national ambitions are not a secret, added that “we can’t trust” federal law enforcement because officials “want to destroy” Trump.
Note, not even the former president is making claims about the suspect origins of the documents recovered by the FBI.
The FBI executed its court-approved search warrant on Aug. 8. By Aug. 9, Trump’s lawyers, conservative media personalities, and right-wing members of Congress were publicly pushing the line that the FBI might’ve planted incriminating evidence. By Aug. 10, the former president himself broached the subject, as did Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who argued that there’s no way to know whether FBI agents secretly added information to the materials taken from Mar-a-Lago.
By Aug. 12, Trump touted the claim with greater enthusiasm, as did Fox News. As recently as last week, the former president was still pushing the possibility that the FBI “planted” evidence. This morning, against fresh evidence that federal law enforcement found highly sensitive secrets at Mar-a-Lago, Republicans like Noem and Jackson believe the smart move is to distrust the FBI — since it might not have been Trump who put the materials in his own office. Circling back to our earlier coverage, it’s worth pausing to emphasize two simple points. The first is that there’s literally no reason whatsoever to suspect the FBI agents themselves of criminal misconduct. The second is that the only folks who peddle claims like these are those who are deeply afraid of where this investigation is headed.
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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