After the federal indictment against Donald Trump was unsealed, many of the former president’s critics encouraged the public to read it. The Republican’s allies did not. As we’ve discussed, this offered a timely reminder that in too much of GOP politics, there’s an assumption that Americans won’t actually read relevant documents, which makes it easier to mislead people.
But there’s another dimension to this that’s just as important: Many Republican officials themselves can’t be bothered to read source materials. The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone published an interesting report on this yesterday afternoon.
When he asked Sen. Joni Ernst, for example, whether she’d read the indictment, she responded, “I have not.” The Iowa Republican added, “I have been on the road, thank you very much.” Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska said she hasn’t read it because she had “work to do.”
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said he’d looked at the document, though he hasn’t “gone through every page of it.” Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana said he hadn’t read it, and when asked why not, “he responded with a silent, frozen half-laugh.”
But this was my favorite part of The Bulwark’s report:
[M]ost peculiar among responses from the senators who didn’t read the indictment was that of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee during the Trump presidency. “I haven’t read it at all. I’m not a legal analyst. I’m gonna leave that to the professionals to tell us about it. I’ve read everything I can of secondary sources of it, but not the original.”
In case this isn’t obvious, the relatively brief indictment — it’s really just 44 double-spaced pages — is quite readable. One need not be a “legal analyst” to understand it.
Someone with 42 years of experience as a U.S. senator — a tenure that includes a four-year stint as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and several additional years as the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee — shouldn’t have any trouble at all going through it.
But Grassley, among several other GOP colleagues, took a pass. The frontrunner for their party’s presidential nomination stands accused of a variety of serious felonies, which might’ve jeopardized U.S. national security, but a variety of Republican senators nevertheless remain an incurious bunch. Making matters slightly worse is the familiarity of the circumstances. Around this time four years ago, for example, special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was released to the public, and a great many Republicans on Capitol Hill conceded that they hadn’t bothered to read that document, either. Among those who confessed to not having read it: Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was the chair of the Judiciary Committee at the time. Indeed, this comes up all the time. Revisiting our recent coverage, by all appearances, many Republicans didn’t read the Durham report. Or the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings on the Russia scandal. Or the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the investigation into the Russia scandal. I’m trying to think of a credible excuse for brazen laziness on this scale. Nothing is coming to mind.
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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