Republicans backing ex-president 'tell lies at least as dangerous as Trump's alleged actions': columnist

On Friday, June 9, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) responded to former President Donald Trump's 37-count federal criminal indictment by tweeting a video of comments she had made a year earlier.

The arch-conservative congresswoman was serving as vice chair of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-California) bipartisan January 6 Select Committee when, on June 9, 2022, she declared, "Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues: You are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain."

Cheney tweeted that her June 2022 warning "still applies" — an obvious attack on all the Republicans who have been rushing to Trump's defense in response to the federal prosecution he is facing. Special counsel Jack Smith alleges that Trump endangered the United States' national security by storing classified government documents, including those with top-secret information, at Mar-a-Lago.

Some Republicans are defending Trump more aggressively than others.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on June 15, journalist Jill Lawrence slams the Republicans who are "threading the needle" when discussing Smith's case against Trump. Their tepid criticism of Trump, Lawrence stresses, is too little too late.

"Sure, some of them are saying aloud that maybe, if that gobsmacking federal indictment is true, even fractionally, he just might be careless — even a teensy bit reckless — about how he handles top national security secrets," Lawrence explains. "Never mind that this has been clear since his first months in office…. Any acknowledgment is welcome, even now, eight long years into this nightmare. That said, those who publicly recognize Trump's malfeasance don't deserve praise for pivoting, shifting, or threading some needle between telling the truth about Trump and protecting their own ambitions."

Lawrence continues, "The problem is that the concession is wrapped in lies at least as dangerous as Trump's alleged actions themselves — lies that, like Trump's Big Lie that he won the presidency in 2020, are designed to sow mistrust in American elections, institutions, and rule of law. Most GOP leaders are offering hedged concerns about Trump accompanied by fevered falsehoods about a two-tiered justice system weaponized by President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice, and the FBI to go after, well, Donald Trump."

Lawrence goes on to criticize former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other Republicans who have been attacking the Smith/DOJ indictment. "Trump is unfit for office," Lawrence writes, "and more prominent Republicans should be saying that flat out without burying it in baseless assaults on the pillars of U.S. democracy."