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It was early Saturday morning when Donald Trump published a prediction: The former president said he expected to be indicted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Tuesday. As The New York Times noted, the message was effectively “a starter’s gun for Republican officials,” and many dutifully raced to tout their support.
[The former president’s declaration] prompted Republican leaders to rush to Mr. Trump’s side and to attack the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, who has indicated he is likely to bring charges against Mr. Trump in connection with 2016 hush money payments to a porn star who said she’d had an affair with him. ... A crush of other Republicans denounced the expected charges as politically motivated.
The list of prominent GOP officials and candidates who issued such statements is not short — and Team Trump made clear that it was keeping score, pushing those who hadn’t spoken up to issue statements of their own.
But it was House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who famously said he’d "had it with this guy" in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, only to kiss Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago soon after — whose reaction stood out.
“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” the Californian wrote on Saturday morning. “I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”
It was a cheap and unnecessary move. If McCarthy and other congressional Republicans want to remind the public that Trump enjoys the presumption of innocence, fine. If they want to predict that the former president, if he’s indicted, will eventually be acquitted, no problem.
But to direct members to launch a congressional investigation was ridiculous. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown explained:
[McCarthy’s] tweet is clearly a political threat in the guise of apolitical concern-trolling. Luckily for [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin] Bragg, it also happens to be a pretty empty threat. Because McCarthy is misconstruing — willfully or ignorantly — how those “federal funds” he’s referred to are actually spent. “State and federal funding make up a small portion” of district attorney funding and consist “mostly of various grants that support crime victims’ programs, efforts to prevent intoxicated driving, gender-based violence work, opioid programming and justice assistance grants to name a few,” according to the New York City Council’s finance division.
A day later, however, McCarthy added a new caveat to his message. “I don’t think people should protest this, no,” the speaker told reporters during a House Republican retreat in Orlando. “And I think President Trump, if you talk to him, he doesn’t believe that, either. ... We want calmness out there.”
McCarthy added, "I think the thing that you may misinterpret when President Trump talks and someone says that they can protest, he’s probably referring to my tweet: educate people about what’s going on."
For all intents and purposes, this was largely the opposite of the messages Trump published to his social media platform a day earlier: “WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”
At no point did the former president make reference to “calmness” or anything like it. He also didn't say anything about "educating" people.
The result is a potentially awkward political dynamic. Will Trump denounce McCarthy for discouraging protests? Will McCarthy feel the need to issue a “clarification” that’s at odds with his on-the-record comments? Watch this space.