Fresno Bee – Opinion
Kevin McCarthy’s way to defend Trump: Pivot, confuse and corrode democracy | Opinion
Tad Weber – August 1, 2023
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is using time-tested political strategies in defense of former President Donald Trump and his legal troubles.
First, pivot. Then deflect. Lastly, confuse.
This was on display recently when the Bakersfield Republican, now the congressional representative for Clovis and eastern parts of Fresno County, was asked about the latest charges added to an indictment against the former president over his alleged mishandling of presidential records.
The Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, brought additional charges to the indictment that accuse Trump of obstructing justice and willfully keeping a top-secret document. The three charges were added to the 37 already filed.
For review, Trump is being accused of keeping a horde of confidential and top-secret documents at his Florida home in violation of the Presidential Records Act. It requires all such materials to be handed over to the National Archives once a president leaves office.
Trump allegedly did not comply. Among the evidence cited by Smith are photos of documents spilled over the floor at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
In the latest charges, Trump is alleged to have shown some visitors a battle plan for U.S. military forces if they were to attack a foreign country. CNN reported it to be Iran. Trump is heard on an audio recording talking about the document and admitting it is confidential.
In the two obstruction charges, Trump is alleged to have directed a pair of employees to delete security-camera footage at Mar-a-Lago once the Justice Department issued a subpoena for it.
Pivot, deflect, confuse
CNN reporter Manu Raju caught up with McCarthy last Thursday to ask him about the latest charges against Trump.
Rather than address them, McCarthy pivoted without hesitation and deflected attention away from Trump and instead shined a spotlight on President Biden.
“What concerns me is you have a sitting president that has a situation like this, but even worse, that had documents, but nothing’s happened,” McCarthy told Raju. “The president, when he was a senator, he took a document. How many years is that and there’s been no prosecution?”
That last point — when Biden was a senator from Delaware — is the attempt to confuse.
McCarthy did not elaborate further, so one is left to assume he is referring to a claim by Trump that Biden has 1,850 boxes of confidential records that he has not turned over.
“By the way, Biden’s got 1,850 boxes,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Georgia. “He’s fighting them on the boxes. He doesn’t want to give the boxes and then they say, ‘Trump is obstructioning’.”
The Associated Press did a fact check of Trump’s claim and found it false.
The National Archives says the 1,850 boxes are actually from Biden’s time in the Senate before he became vice president under then-President Obama. The papers are housed at the University of Delaware.
Records accumulated from serving in the Senate are personal property and not subject to the Presidential Records Act.
“While the FBI has searched the Delaware university records as part of a larger search for classified documents, there is no evidence they were withheld from authorities in any way,” the AP reported.
Corrosive effect
If McCarthy was referring to discoveries earlier this year at Biden’s home and the former private office of official documents from his vice presidential years, the comparison with Trump still does not hold up.
Unlike Trump, Biden has fully cooperated with investigators once the discoveries came to light. He was found to possess a small number of documents. Biden’s attorney general picked a special counsel to investigate the Biden records — a lawyer appointed by Trump when he was president.
Trump, by contrast, has steadfastly opposed efforts by the National Archives to return the documents in his possession. It took an FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago to secure the materials. Thirty-three boxes and 11,000 documents were taken from the Florida home. Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr said Trump took the documents to “flip the bird” at the government.
As House speaker, McCarthy is one of the most powerful politicians in America today. His constant defense of Trump, in advance of trials, that have not yet even started, is a corrosive agent on American democracy. He stirs doubt and suspicion by regularly repeating that the nation operates with a “two tiers” system of justice — one protecting Biden, one prosecuting Trump.
To see it another way, just flip the script. What if, instead of Trump having been charged for things like obstruction of justice and willful detention of records belonging to the American people, it had been Hillary Clinton? What would McCarthy be saying then?
The answer is obvious.