An attempt by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to defend Donald Trump after he was indicted for a third time in four months is not to be taken seriously after Rubio made statements that he fully knows are not grounded in reality, an analyst said Thursday.
In his column for MSNBC, Steve Benen took the Florida lawmaker to task for rushing to the former president's defense after special counsel Jack Smith filed multiple conspiracy charges against the former president related to the 2020 presidential election.
With Rubio writing, "Apparently it is now a crime to make statements challenging election results if a prosecutor decides those statements aren’t true," Benen pointed out that it was plainly obvious Rubio was working off talking points and had not read the 45-page filing.
As the columnist wrote, Rubio's complaints reeked of "a politician pushing foolish rhetoric that he even can’t seriously believe," before adding that the Florida senator knew better than to make his second assertion, where he wrote, "So when should we expect indictments of the democrat (sic) politicians who falsely claimed Russia hacked the 2016 election?”
"The truly amazing part of his missive was the senator trying to link together Trump’s election scandal and those who have the audacity to believe the Russia scandal. As Rubio characterized it, there’s an equivalence between the former president trying to overturn an election and seize illegitimate power, and those who 'falsely' accused the Kremlin of targeting the U.S. elections in 2016 to benefit the Republican ticket."
As Benen pointed out, the Rubio-chaired Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that did single out Russian interference in US elections.
"The panel published its voluminous findings, which arrived at a variety of important conclusions, including the apparent fact that the Russian government 'directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level,'" Benen wrote before adding, "This was not an obscure document unrelated to Rubio’s work on Capitol Hill; he was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the panel released its findings, which makes his latest rhetoric all the more difficult to explain."
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