Joe Scarborough Warns GOP Against ‘Cheering’ Trump’s Crackdown on His ‘Enemies’: ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough issued a blunt warning to Republicans against “cheering” on President Donald Trump’s crackdown against his “political enemies” – telling members of his former party that “what goes around comes around.”
A federal grand jury in Virginia indicted former FBI Director James Comey on two felony counts late Thursday tied to his September 2020 congressional testimony about the bureau’s investigation into alleged links between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
The indictment set off sharply divided reactions in Washington D.C. as critics on the left warned it marked a dangerous breach of norms, casting the prosecution as evidence that the Justice Department had been bent into a tool for political retribution. On the right, however, some of Trump’s allies greeted the charges with celebration of what they saw as long-overdue accountability.
Scarborough emerged as one the critics in his opening volley at the top of Friday’s show. The indictment of Comey, he said, was “tough day” for “people who believe in the rule of law, who believe in the political norms and the constitutional norms that have shaped this country.”
The host, who previously served as a GOP congressman, had a pointed warning for his former party colleagues as he warned them against “cheering” the “dangerous” new precedent:
Republicans must understand that what goes around comes around. They must understand that if there’s a billionaire independent who decides to be president of the United States, gets elected and then decides to start going after Republicans, Republican senators, Republican House members, Republican judges, Republican political operatives, all that independent will have to do is just pick up the phone, call his or her attorney general and say: ‘Arrest Republican senator A, arrest Republican political opponent B. Go after conservative think tank C. I mean, it is, again, extraordinarily dangerous.
“Here it is right in front of us, the weaponization of government,” co-host Willie Geist added.
Watch above via MSNBC.
