'They know he did it!' MSNBC's Morning Joe and Mika bash GOP senators for 'humiliating' defense of Trump crimes

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski shamed congressional Republicans for ignoring the obvious and defending President Donald Trump from crimes they know he committed.

The "Morning Joe" hosts pointed to Sen. Lindsey Graham's latest defense of the Ukraine scheme, arguing that EU ambassador Gordon Sondland -- a Trump donor -- was working with Democrats to bring down the president, who the South Carolina Republican also claimed was too incoherent to put together a quid pro quo.

"Lindsey is once again doing the 'they're too stupid to collude' defense that a lot of people on the Hill did during Russia," Scarborough said, "and now they're saying even though they have all the documentation of, as John Bolton called it, Rudy (Giuliani)'s drug deal, they had a very specific plan, laid it out. We have all the testimony, the sworn testimony."

Scarborough bashed Graham -- a former military lawyer and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- for ignoring the rules of evidence and misrepresenting criminal procedure.

"Now he's saying, 'I've been a lawyer a long time, when somebody changes their testimony, they become suspicious,'" Scarborough said. "Actually, everybody's been saying it publicly. (Sondland) chose to tell the truth in sworn testimony because he didn't sign up to go to jail, and Lindsey knows that."

"I just wonder how low these people are going to go, how much they're going to degrade themselves," he added, "I feel so sorry for them that they're allowing themselves to be degraded by Donald Trump, a guy that won't return a favor, and Lindsey put him in the front of that line here. This is just humiliating for him."

Co-host Willie Geist wondered how the White House would try to discredit Sondland, who was named a diplomat after donating $1 million to the Trump campaign, and he was ashamed for the lawmakers going along with that obviously dubious scheme to paint him as a Democratic collaborator.

"It's sad," Geist said, "and there are a lot of we've had on the show who we respect who are now saying things to completely degrade themselves, and as you say, for what? As if Donald Trump is ever going to return the favor and ever take care of them? We see what he does to people who cross him. We see what he does to people. 'I never met him, didn't really know him, can't remember meeting him.' That's what happens in the end. You end up like Michael Cohen. You don't end up at the hand of the president of the United States. It's really pathetic and sad to watch as an American."

Co-host Mika Brzezinski agreed, and said Republicans were defending the indefensible.

"They're doing this even though it's clear it happened," she said. "This quid pro quo and this scandal and potentially, for sure, corruption, but even break the law, it happened. They're fighting to try and protect the president from something he did -- by the way, something they know he did."