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In a biography scheduled for release a week before the election, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell expressed support for special counsel Jack Smith and stated that he hopes former President Trump will “pay a price” for his actions related to January 6th.
Axios reported that while “McConnell has long been a Trump critic…a new book throws his weight behind some of the most serious federal charges against Trump.”
“If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is,” the longest-serving Republican leader told journalist Michael Tackett in an interview for “The Price of Power,” just a few weeks after Smith became the first prosecutor to file charges against an ex-president in August 2023.
“From the start, McConnell thought the charges brought by federal prosecutors against Trump had merit,” Tackett wrote. McConnell told him, “There’s no doubt who inspired it, and I just hope that he’ll have to pay a price for it,” in reference to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol Building.
An unarmed Trump supporter, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, 36, was shot and killed by a U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant with a sketchy past, was killed during the riot. In January of this year, her family filed a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. government.
“Tackett’s book reveals just how seriously McConnell considered voting to convict Trump of related impeachment charges in 2021,” Axios reported. “Conviction could have led to the Senate blocking Trump from running for office again.”
The GOP leader seriously considered voting to convict, according to an interview he gave for the book a week after the riot.
“I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense. I think it is,” McConnell said in the oral history interview.
McConnell claimed that Trump urged people to assault the U.S. Capitol, adding that “is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine.” But in reality, Trump never urged supporters to storm the building; he explicitly asked supporters during a “Stop the Steal” speech on the Ellipse to “march peacefully” to the Capitol and be heard.
Ultimately, McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, voted for acquittal because Trump had since left office.
“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one,” McConnell noted after the vote.
In a statement, McConnell said, “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”
McConnell publicly endorsed Trump in March.
McConnell even requested former House Speaker Paul Ryan to arrange a secret meeting in 2022, allowing him to express some of his concerns to Fox founder Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, according to the book.
Axios noted that should Trump manage to evade all of the charges filed against him by the Biden-Harris regime, it will be in large part thanks to McConnell ditching the filibuster to confirm all three of Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominees. The constitutionalist-leaning high court ruled earlier this year that presidents are entitled to near-immunity from prosecution for “official actions.”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, meanwhile, stated on Friday that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan of D.C. risked prejudicing potential jurors against Trump by allowing the release of additional documents in the Jan. 6 case filed by special counsel Jack Smith.
Chutkan agreed to Smith’s request to make four filings, totaling over 1,800 pages of potential evidence in the federal election interference case against Trump, available to the public.
“I’m not curious because I thought from the beginning this was a political exercise. Now, that doesn’t mean there’s not a case in there someplace, but the timing of this strategically has always been a political exercise,” McCarthy said when asked by “The Story” guest host Trace Gallagher if he found the timing “curious.”
“I have to chuckle when Judge Chutkan says she would not want to let politics or anything like that enter into her decision-making. A judge in a normal case, Trace, would be concerned about the jury pool,” he added.
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