Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell privately threw his weight behind federal investigations into alleged criminal acts carried out by his party’s presidential nominee.
Though McConnell has hardly made a secret of his contempt for Donald Trump in the past, Axios reports that an upcoming biography reveals how behind closed doors, the veteran lawmaker went as far as backing Department of Justice probes into Trump’s role in the Capitol Riots and his alleged concealment of sensitive government documents.
“If [Trump] hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is,” McConnell is understood to have told Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, in an August 2023 interview for The Price of Power, due to hit shelves a week before the November election.
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“There’s no doubt who inspired [the Jan. 6 riots], and I just hope that he’ll have to pay a price for it,” the Republican leader reportedly adds.
It follows after earlier sneak-peaks at the upcoming book revealed McConnell had privately described Trump as a “stupid”, “ill-tempered”, “narcissit[ic]” and generally “despicable human being.”
How McConnell may look to square those comments with his current political position remains to be seen, given that whatever his prior qualms, he nevertheless went ahead and endorsed Trump for president earlier in March.
“It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States,” as he wrote then. “It should come as no surprise that as a nominee, he will have my support.”
In response to Axios’ recent report on the upcoming book, McConnell appeared to downplay his previous private efforts to see his party’s candidate indicted on serious federal charges.
“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him,” McConnell told the outlet. “But we’re all on the same team now.”
In fairness, he’s not wrong, given Vance had famously described himself as a “never-Trump guy” before swallowing his medicine to assume a place alongside “America’s Hitler” on the Republican ticket, and that Graham continues to defend Trump against accusations of fascist rhetoric even while describing the presidential nominee’s Mar-a-Lago resort as akin to North Korea.
