As bad as Attorney General Pam Bondi’s widely criticized performance before a Senate Oversight Committee appearance was last week, some underreported comments by Republican senators were even more alarming, wrote the New York Times’ Frank Bruni.
In his column on Monday, Bruni first called out Bondi for what he called spreading “bile” with her “sour expression and clipped expectorations,” but then swiftly turned to GOP senators who used their time to attempt to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 insurrection and take the blame off of Donald Trump.
“I found the behavior of Republican senators at the hearing even more disturbing,” Bruni wrote, adding that Trump, as of late, has been revisiting and harping on the insurrection, which he believes is “partly because he can’t quit his claims of victimhood, which have potent resonance in this age of grievance.”
To that end, Bruni suggested Trump’s "lackeys" in the Senate are hard at work rewriting history so they can paint Democrats as the culprits behind the riot that sent lawmakers on both sides of the aisle fleeing for their lives.
“I think that at some point, on some level, Trump understood that his complicity in the violence of Jan. 6 — his responsibility for it, according to the articles of his second impeachment — was more damning than any of his other transgressions: an utterly inexcusable, definitively nullifying breach,” he wrote. “I’m sure that some Republican members of Congress still, in the recesses of their dormant consciences, recognize it as such. That’s why they’ve questioned and recast Jan. 6 in so many ways, from so many angles, at such length. Trump and the Republicans who’ve hitched their political fates to him must defuse it, confuse it, make it go away.”
Noting that several senators latched on to a report that FBI sent agents to the riot after it started, thereby spreading misinformation, he called the pro-Trump efforts “morally perverse.”
“But Republicans generally never correct Trump," Bruni wrote. "They coddle him. Exonerate him. Which is what the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee did when Bondi dropped by. The tangent that they went on was no tangent at all. It was a purposeful, cynical distraction in the service of their irascible overlord and his biggest, most enduring lie."
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