Congress’s investigation into Donald Trump’s effort to commandeer the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election is just getting off the ground, with the first transcripts of testimony collected over the weekend yet to be released.
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But as we wait, one Republican, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), is stepping forward to offer a preemptive defense of the former president. It’s just not the most ironclad one.
Grassley took to the Senate floor Monday to talk about the situation. He said he was doing so because he felt the summaries of the early testimony by Democrats and the media were misleading. He said he wanted to set the record straight.
Grassley’s argument ultimately boiled down to this: It wasn’t so bad, because Trump didn’t actually get the Justice Department to do what he wanted it to do. Oh, and when he failed at that, he didn’t actually make good on his threats to start firing people and install a loyalist to lead the DOJ.
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It was a familiar defense that Republicans have offered repeatedly over the years. But it’s hardly one that absolves Trump of blame. And it leads to the logical question: Just because something might not rise to a criminal level, does that make it okay? Is the intent — to overturn a presidential election based on false claims and misinformation — at all important here?
Grassley’s most contentious argument had to do with Trump’s ultimate decision not to fire acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, a top DOJ official who pushed Trump’s election conspiracy theories inside the Justice Department.
“The essential question that should be asked is: What was the final decision?” Grassley said. “And that is my major concern about the recent public comments relating to this new Trump investigation.”
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Grassley added: “Did Trump fire the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen? No. Did Trump fire Rich Donoghue, Rosen’s deputy? No.”
This much is true. But the evidence suggests that it’s hardly because Trump decided it was the wrong thing to do. It was because Justice Department leaders threatened mass resignations if Trump pursued the plan.
And pursue the plan Trump did. After threatening to replace Rosen with Clark in late December, it got to the point in early January that Rosen was informed that Trump was indeed replacing him.
Grassley also cited a CNN report that Rosen and Donoghue “testified that in their interactions with Trump, he didn’t order them to do anything illegal and eventually accepted their advice that the Justice Department couldn’t take actions to claim fraud when it had no evidence of it.”
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It’s the same issue with Trump’s potential obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation. Republicans often suggested that Trump’s failure to compel those around him to do his bidding and his lack of follow-through absolved him of guilt. But Grassley’s implication is clearly that firing Rosen would have been problematic. Isn’t it relevant that Trump seemed to be pretty willing to do it, if not for the obstacles that stood in his way? Is everything short of another Saturday Night Massacre fair game for a president?
And what about the stakes here: a transparent attempt to literally overturn a presidential election? We’ve come to find out that Clark was very much ready and willing to claim there was enough potential fraud to overturn the election, but he failed to get his superiors to sign off on such an effort.
The suggestion seems to be that a president can talk about doing such things and even pursue them, but if it doesn’t work, it’s okay. That’s certainly a standard.
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There have been, of course, instances in which Trump did follow through — the most notable case being when he fired FBI Director James B. Comey in 2017.
But in that case, Grassley on Monday pitched it as less of a corrupt maneuver and more something that was forced upon Trump — by Democrats.
Grassley said he was party to a May 2017 meeting in which Comey said Trump wasn’t personally under investigation in the Russia probe — something Comey, after his firing, ultimately confirmed had been true at the time. To hear Grassley tell it, Democrats forced Trump’s hand by wrongly suggesting that Trump had been under investigation.
“Because Comey kept the answer classified, we couldn’t rebut it,” Grassley said. “But Democrats knew it was a lie. And they kept on saying it until Trump fired Comey because he wouldn’t make the fact public.”
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This is certainly a take on the situation. But it doesn’t square with how either Trump or the White House explained it. Initially, they said Comey was fired because of a recommendation from the Justice Department. Then Trump blurted out that he was going to fire Comey regardless of that, and said he did so thinking about how the Russia investigation was “a made-up story.” (We knew at the time that the FBI was probing contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, even if it wasn’t clear whether Trump was personally under investigation.)
Trump clearly wanted Comey to say he wasn’t personally under investigation — as evidenced by Trump saying in firing Comey that Comey had told him that on multiple occasions — but it’s rather reductive to suggest that this is the reason for his firing.
The last point here is Grassley’s stated purpose for speaking out: that Democrats are being misleading about the evidence.
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“If the facts eventually fit the Democratic narrative that they so badly want to be true, then they fit. It is what it is. But I haven’t seen anything backing up their misleading conclusions,” Grassley said.
He added: “Why would any witness want to testify now, at the risk of their words being leaked and twisted to satisfy a partisan agenda?”
It’s a valid concern that piecemeal leaks about still-unreleased testimony might paint a slanted picture; we should all wait for the full investigative product before drawing too many conclusions.
But this isn’t really the standard Grassley applied to the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose report then-Attorney General William P. Barr preempted with a highly misleading summary.
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Grassley said at the time, “Everybody would have to be satisfied with his response, because he had a telephone conversation with Mueller, and Mueller told him he wasn’t so concerned about the way the original letter was handled; he was concerned about what the press was saying.”
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Mueller did indeed try to massage this issue with his friend and former colleague Barr. But he clearly expressed reservations about Barr’s summary, which was objectively misleading, saying it “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions.” And two federal judges have since blasted Barr’s summary and his explanations of it.
Grassley wrapped up his comments Monday:
“This country has had to deal with the Democrats’ obsession with destroying Trump for much too long,” he said. “In the process, I fear my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have done and will do lasting damage to our country.”
The damage to the country is apparently not so much trying to overturn a presidential election based upon nothing, but being too zealous in investigating that.