Joe Scarborough Ridicules Republicans Defending Trump Indictment: ‘No One is Saying He’s Innocent!’
Joe Scarborough was eager to open Wednesday’s Morning Joe by pointing out that of all the Republicans defending former President Donald Trump, not one is saying he’s innocent.
Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 counts stemming from his handling of government documents after he left office at a federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday. The Department of Justice has claimed that some of those documents were classified and that the former president directed his aide to hide them from his lawyer and federal agents, effectively obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.
Since the indictment against Trump was unsealed last Friday, many of Trump’s surrogates and political allies of the Republican party have run to his defense, talking about a corrupt DOJ and alleging “two tiers of justice” citing Hillary Clinton’s email server investigation as an example.
To illustrate an apparent shifting narrative, Morning Joe producers opened with clips of Senator Marco Rubio warning about how Trump might handle nuclear codes and state secrets when campaigning against Trump in 2016.
“We’re about the turn over the conservative movement to a person that has no ideas of any substance on the important issues, the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual,” he said to CBS News in February of 2016.
However, on Fox News on Tuesday, Rubio dismissed the Trump indictment, saying, “What was the damage? Was this stolen and sold to the Iranians? Sold to the Saudis? You know, given over to the Russians. That allegation’s not made in that indictment. No one’s made that allegation. So at the end of the day, you have to weigh the damage of the indictment versus the damage of the allegations.”
Coming out of the clips, Scarborough appeared to agree with Rubio sarcastically, saying, “It’s not even a close call. You weigh whether you believe, as the 11th Circuit said that the foundational principle of this country is that no man is above the law, and you balance that against whatever Marco was saying, we should balance it against.”
But that was just foreplay for the thing Scarborough couldn’t wait to say, which was as pithy an assessment of the current reaction to the current Trump indictment and the political reaction, especially on the right.
“You will notice. You will notice. Oh, all of the noise out there, of all the ground noise, nobody is saying he’s innocent!” Scarborough performatively announced, perhaps in a self-aware manner that suggested he knew he was going to make a headline on political media websites. “Nobody is saying he did not commit the crimes that will put him in jail for over 100 years if convicted on all things.”
He’s absolutely right, and it’s a solid bit of analysis that’s not only pithy and perfect for a headline but has —impossibly — largely gone unsaid.
Watch above via MSNBC.
