It was early Saturday morning when Donald Trump published a prediction: The former president said he expected to be indicted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Tuesday. As The New York Times noted, the message was effectively “a starter’s gun for Republican officials,” and many dutifully raced to tout their support.
[The former president’s declaration] prompted Republican leaders to rush to Mr. Trump’s side and to attack the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, who has indicated he is likely to bring charges against Mr. Trump in connection with 2016 hush money payments to a porn star who said she’d had an affair with him. … A crush of other Republicans denounced the expected charges as politically motivated.
The list of prominent GOP officials and candidates who issued such statements is not short — and Team Trump made clear that it was keeping score, pushing those who hadn’t spoken up to issue statements of their own.
But it was House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who famously said he’d “had it with this guy” in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, only to kiss Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago soon after — whose reaction stood out.
“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” the Californian wrote on Saturday morning. “I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”
It was a cheap and unnecessary move. If McCarthy and other congressional Republicans want to remind the public that Trump enjoys the presumption of innocence, fine. If they want to predict that the former president, if he’s indicted, will eventually be acquitted, no problem.
But to direct members to launch a congressional investigation was ridiculous. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown explained:
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