House and Senate Republicans have been tying themselves in knots trying to defend Trump after his newest indictments revealed his extraordinary efforts to hide highly classified nuclear and national security documents inside his Mar-a-Lago club even as government officials were trying to get them back. But there’s not much for Trump’s defenders to rally around, given that prosecutors have a tape of Trump literally showing off one of the classified documents because he thought it’d score him points in a petty political fight, and so “trying to defend Trump” is competing with “sprinting away from reporters with Josh Hawley-like grace” when Republicans have to decide whether to even acknowledge the charges against him.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley might have topped all the others. Capitol Hill reporter Joe Perticone reports that Grassley “tells me he hasn’t read the indictment because he’s ‘not a legal analyst.'”
Yes, no legal mumbo-jumbo for Grassley here. Not for Sen. Chuck Grassley, the (checks notes) previous Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Perticone also reports that Joni Ernst, Steve Daines, and Deb Fischer also claim they haven’t read the newest indictment of the last Republican president of the United States, which is puzzling because it’s a very quick read, something that can easily be skimmed in the span of a half hour, and you would think that Senate Republicans still willing to stick their neck out to defend Trump after two impeachments, and an attempted violent coup, and a jury confirmation of sexual assault might want to at least glance at the indictment to learn why Donald now faces Espionage Act charges as well.