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When Rep. Chuck Fleischmann and Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty responded to Donald Trump’s indictment on a national security issue, was anyone surprised by their denunciation of the FBI, Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice and the nation’s allegedly weaponized and two-tiered justice system?
Nope. Their statements were 100% predictable and larded thick with cliches.
Without proof, Hagerty claimed the nation’s “two-tiered justice system [was] on full display,” thereby making America “look like a banana republic.”
Fleischmann’s nonsensical claim was that Trump has been targeted by “a relentless effort to undermine and destroy him by any means,” and the “indictment shows the weaponization of the DOJ and FBI.”
Blackburn claimed the FBI had displayed an “unprecedented vendetta against Trump,” and that “a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for an attorney general to approve an FBI raid on the home of a former president.”
Well, yeah. But it would also have been unthinkable that a former president would haul boxes of White House documents, many of them highly classified, back to his Florida castle where he failed to ensure their security. Of course, a search warrant would have been unnecessary had Trump returned all of “his” papers. He returned some papers, thus forcing the FBI to obtain a warrant to search his residence — where they found more documents.
Does Blackburn have any qualms about Trump’s willingness to flout any president’s most crucial responsibility: demonstrating the diligence necessary to protect the nation’s security.
Hagerty and Fleischmann, like Blackburn, appear to be the latest officeholders who apparently have contracted what-about-ism, a political virus that blinds victims to the excesses of their fellow party members while damning those of the other party.
One official who has inoculated himself is Bill Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, who during the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, insurrection dismissed as “BS” Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
It was thus no surprise that he denounced the claim that Trump’s indictment was politically motivated:
“Over time, people will see that this is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt. In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the president … This would have gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents. But he jerked them around for a year and a half.”
Since the grand jury’s indictment of Trump, the political blowback warns us of a possible danger to our system of government. A former Republican congressman, David Jolly, who left the party during Trump’s presidency, told The New York Times that “the verdict on democracy ultimately comes down to Republican leaders and Republican voters. Their current weaponization narrative is dangerous and destabilizing, but seems to reflect the party’s early consensus. If they don’t pivot soon to due process and faith in the system, I think we could have very dark days ahead.”
Jolly’s suggestion should prompt current GOP officeholders and voters to remember August 1974.
Three Republican senators — including Barry Goldwater, the party’s conservative presidential nominee in 1964 — confronted then-President Richard Nixon on August 7, 1974, with the warning that he was unlikely to survive a Senate vote on his impeachment for his criminal conduct in the Watergate scandal.
Nixon resigned the next day, effective Aug. 9.
Garrett Graff, who wrote “Watergate: A New History,” published last year, told The Times that “in 1972 to 1974, the Republicans participated as good-faith members of the process … and as legislators first and Republicans second. They followed the facts where they led.”
Blackburn, Hagerty and Fleischmann had the same opportunity to distinguish themselves in the Trump indictment. Their apparent failure to do so is an insult to Tennesseans and to America.
Michael Loftin is a former editorial page editor at The Chattanooga Times.
