Republicans went berserk Tuesday after Donald Trump revealed he received a letter that contained “HORRIFYING NEWS”—that he may be the target of DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 probe.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called any potential charges “phony” and “fake” when speaking to reporters Tuesday, suggesting that the investigation is completely politicized considering Trump is “winning the Republican primary.”
“Is this where our country is now? Because it’s an embarrassment on the world stage,” she said. “If this is the direction the world America is going in, we’re worse than Russia. We’re worse than China.”
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“It’s outrageous,” Greene continued. “I can’t believe our country has to endure this. I’ll be standing with President Trump the entire way.”
Greene said in another interview: “Yeah, it’s absolute bullshit, that’s my reaction. This is the only way that the Democrats have to beat President Trump.”
Trump is still clearing his GOP competition when it comes to polling, and his recent indictments haven’t seemed to deter his voter base in any meaningful way. In fact, his lead over consensus No. 2 Ron DeSantis managed to grow directly after his federal indictment last month.
“I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn’t do anything while things were going on,” DeSantis said Tuesday in his first response. “We want to be in a situation where you don’t have one side just constantly trying to put the other side in jail.”
Similarly to Greene, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) accused the Biden administration of “weaponizing” the government to squash Trump’s polling numbers—despite the fact that previous investigations and subsequent indictments did no such thing.
“Recently, President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for re-election,” McCarthy said Tuesday. “So what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their number one opponent. It’s time and time again.”
Even Mike Pence—who at times has been squeamish to criticize Trump, but has done so on occasion, said he hopes the probe doesn’t lead to an indictment of his former boss.
“I’m not convinced that the president acting on the bad advice of a group of crank lawyers that came into the White House in the days before Jan. 6 is actually criminal,” Pence told NewsNation. “I don’t know what the letter today means, the notification means, but my hope is that the judgment about the president’s actions on Jan. 6 would be left to the American people.”
Trump still faces numerous other investigations for his conduct in the White House and beyond. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. is prosecuting him for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in 2016. Another indictment could come against the former president in the coming weeks over his 2021 phone call with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president attempted to pressure Raffensperger into “finding him votes” to win the state in the 2020 presidential election.
