WASHINGTON — In the days after Donald Trump was indicted on federal charges for hoarding documents containing sensitive national security information, the response from Northwest Republicans in Congress reflected the former president’s firm hold on the GOP base.
With few exceptions, Republicans in the House and Senate have avoided commenting on the allegations contained in the indictment, which accuses Trump of refusing to return classified documents and then obstructing the government’s effort to get them back. He also is accused in the 37-count indictment of making false statements to investigators.
GOP lawmakers have questioned the credibility of the FBI and the Department of Justice, which charged Trump with 37 felony counts.
“I don’t trust the DOJ. I don’t trust the FBI,” Rep. Russ Fulcher of Idaho said Tuesday. “I’m not saying that what he did was right — I don’t know the answer to that — but I can tell you history and the pattern has shown that those making the accusations do not have credibility.”
Fulcher, who represents North Idaho, was the only congressional Republican from the Northwest to release a statement immediately after the indictment was unsealed June 9. In an interview at the Capitol, he said he sees the classified documents case as just the latest in a series of attempts to sideline Trump, who entered a not guilty plea at his arraignment Tuesday in Miami.
“How many times do these charges and accusations come up? How many times do they get refuted? I’ve said it over and over again: Donald Trump is not a choirboy, OK? But he doesn’t deserve to get this type of vitriolic persecution,” Fulcher said.
Other Republicans emphasized that Trump is innocent until proven guilty — a point special counsel Jack Smith made when he announced the charges. But because Trump’s legal team could likely delay a trial until after the 2024 election, public perceptions of the case may carry consequences before a jury could render a verdict.
“Nobody should be above the law,” Rep. Dan Newhouse said in a brief interview at the Capitol on Tuesday. “I think the defense and the prosecution both have an opportunity to make their case, and I’m not going to make any judgments before then.”
Newhouse, who represents Central Washington and is the only Republican who survived a Trump-backed primary challenge after voting to impeach the former president for inciting the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, called the allegations “pretty serious,” but said Trump deserves a fair trial.
“It’s a huge responsibility on the part of the Department of Justice,” Newhouse said, adding that he doesn’t share Fulcher’s distrust of the nation’s chief law enforcement agency.
Some Republicans have preferred to say nothing about the charges against Trump. Asked about the indictment at the Capitol on Wednesday, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Spokane said only, “I don’t want to comment.”
The discovery of classified documents at Trump’s home — and at the homes of President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence — has prompted debate about how the federal government handles sensitive information. Critics have long argued that even public documents such as news articles are often wrongly marked as classified, although the documents Trump is alleged to have retained contained U.S. military secrets and other highly sensitive information.
Unlike Trump, Pence and Biden have cooperated with authorities and returned the classified documents found at their residences. In January, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed another special counsel to investigate the documents Biden kept after his time as vice president. That investigation is ongoing.
The Senate Intelligence Committee voted unanimously this week to advance legislation that would reform how classified documents are handled when a president or vice president leaves office.
A spokeswoman for Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, a member of the Intelligence Committee and the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he wouldn’t comment on Trump’s indictment.
At the Capitol on Wednesday, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho declined to say anything about Trump’s alleged actions.
“The only comment I’m going to make is that I believe that it is clearly unequal application of the law,” the Republican said. “I’m not going to parse it all out. What I’m going to say is I believe that this is weaponization of the justice system and that it is unequal application of the law.”
Republican voters see the federal indictment as part of an effort to block Trump’s campaign to return to the White House. The former president was indicted in New York City in April on separate charges related to campaign finance violations, then a special counsel appointed under Trump released a report in May that faulted the FBI for its inquiry into Trump’s suspected collusion with Russia.
“It appears that it’s an unfair justice system and they’re strictly trying to take him out of the running for 2024,” said Mike McKee, former chairman of the Grant County Republican Party and cofounder of the conservative group Restore Washington. “The gut feeling is that it’s trumped-up charges.”
But Bill Barr, who led the Justice Department under Trump and has been a staunch defender of the former president in those earlier cases, said during a Fox News interview on June 11, “I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were, frankly.”
“If even half of it is true, he’s toast,” Barr said. “I think the government acted responsibly. They gave him every opportunity to return those documents. They acted with restraint. They were very deferential to him and they were very patient. They talked to him for almost a year to try to get those documents, and he jerked them around.”
Smith, the special counsel, said at a news conference announcing the charges that his office would seek a speedy trial, but Trump’s legal team will likely file motions to postpone the trial until sometime in 2024, or perhaps even after the presidential election. That raises the possibility that the case could help Trump’s electoral chances, as polls show he remains popular among GOP voters and most of his primary opponents have rushed to support him in the wake of the indictment.
“Democrats seem oblivious to the positive effects these attacks have on Trump’s popularity,” Brent Regan, chairman of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, wrote in an email.
Fulcher echoed that idea, saying the indictment will only fuel the sentiment he hears constantly from constituents that the federal government and its intelligence agencies are corrupt.
“Whether they succeed or not, this is a done deal in the minds of Americans,” Fulcher said. “The Trump people are locked in, and it’s only going to bolster his position. He’s going to be a martyr on behalf of the conservative movement.”
The congressman said that distrust among people in Idaho’s 1st district extends to lawmakers like him, who feel pressure to go to Washington, D.C., to “fix it,” only to find that Congress has limited power over agencies like the FBI and Justice Department.
“The confidence in what I do — the confidence in anybody in this building — is so low,” Fulcher said. “The only thing that we have is our own reputation at home, so when I go home, I still spend a third of my time in a town hall meeting talking about the corruption in Washington, D.C., and quite frankly, trying to rebuild the confidence in me, that I’m not part of the bad stuff.”
Deanna Martinez, the deputy mayor of Moses Lake and chair of Mainstream Republicans of Washington, a moderate GOP group, said she believes that a “silent majority” of conservative voters doesn’t want the divisiveness Trump fosters.
“I think there’s this environment where you have to have a reaction, and it has to be with what people consider the majority,” Martinez said, speaking for herself because the group she leads doesn’t get involved in national politics.
“We need to get back to some common civility. We need to trust each other,” she said, comparing Trump’s calls to defund the Justice Department and FBI with the movement some Democrats have supported to defund police departments.
In an interview Tuesday on CBS Mornings, former House Speaker Paul Ryan explained why his fellow Republicans are afraid to cross Trump.
“The thing with Trump is he’s so vindictive,” Ryan said. “If you have a future in front of you that you envision in the Republican Party, you start with your base. You have to win a primary, and if that vindictiveness gets trained on you, sort of like the Eye of Sauron going after you, it will make it more difficult for you to succeed where you are.”
Biden has declined to comment on Trump’s indictment, repeating that the Justice Department is independent from the White House. In a speech at his golf resort in New Jersey after his arraignment, Trump made it clear that would not be the case if he is elected president again, pledging to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family.”
Democrats in Congress have mostly kept quiet, too, leery of further politicizing the case and eager to let Trump define the GOP as the 2024 elections approach.
“I see why the Republicans are doing it,” Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who faces a tough re-election race, said Tuesday at the Capitol. “He’s the leader of their party. They’ve got to stick behind him, and we’ll see how this plays out. But if the accusations are correct, this is a better country than this.”
Sitting in the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House chamber on Tuesday, Fulcher summed up the mood among Republicans.
“The bottom line is we could be living in the most corrupt time in the history of this nation,” he said. “Or maybe it’s not the most corrupt, but the public perception is that it is.”Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
