WASHINGTON — A handful of Texas Republicans in Congress have energetically defended Donald Trump since the Justice Department accused him of mishandling classified documents he shouldn’t have kept after leaving the White House.
Far more have denounced the prosecution as a political hit job, without asserting the ex-president is innocent.
From many others, the silence has been deafening. They’ve avoided weighing in, either to defend or denounce him, ducking and ignoring questions.
“Shoot me an email. We’re running late. We’re not doing that,” an aide to Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, said, trying to block a reporter from asking her boss about Trump’s indictment as he left the House chamber.
“I’m a former federal prosecutor and I’m reading through the indictment, and I’m not going to comment until I’ve had a chance to read through it. You know I love you, man,” said McCaul, one of a handful of Texas Republicans who condemned Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying he might have committed impeachable offenses by stoking the violence.
Days after the indictment was unsealed, only a handful of Texas Republicans in Congress have directly asserted that he’s innocent. In the House, 10 of the 25 have not publicly condemned the prosecution, suggesting softness in his support within the party’s congressional wing.
Reps. Jake Ellzey, R-Midlothian, and Nathaniel Moran, R-Tyler, are among those remaining mum, both declining comment Tuesday as Trump was being arraigned.
“You get down to the people that love Trump and the people that maybe like him, but don’t want the noise anymore,” said Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, chair of the Dallas County GOP. “I don’t take it as anybody thinking that he’s probably guilty. ... People have different personal feelings on how to handle these types of things.”
Sen. John Cornyn, one of four GOP senators who’ve said they want someone other than Trump as the party’s presidential nominee, chose his words carefully as reporters swarmed.
Having already deemed Trump likely to lose in 2024 given his legal troubles and inability to broaden his appeal, Cornyn declined to opine on whether the latest charges make him even more of a liability.
“Well, it’s not good,” Cornyn said as he turned and walked into Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s office while reporters shouted questions, clamoring in vain for him to elaborate.
The Dallas Morning News spoke briefly with both Texas senators Monday, and requested indictment-related interviews from all 25 House Republicans. There were no takers, though several stopped to chat when The News crossed paths with them at the Capitol.
Like McCaul, Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Pilot Point, didn’t seem eager to talk at length about the case.
“It’s a raw deal he’s getting,” he said as he waited for an elevator after a committee meeting. “The leading candidate for the nomination of his party, probably leading the current president in the polls, and this is somehow OK? It’s just wrong.”
Had he read the indictment?
“I haven’t had a chance to yet, but all of this is wrong,” Burgess said as the doors closed, declining a reporter’s request to board the elevator and continue the conversation.
A number of Texas Republicans have offered full-throated defenses, among them Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman.
“Nobody is alleging that any national security has been compromised. Nothing has leaked out,” Fallon said in an interview posted online Monday with Tony Perkins, founder of the conservative Family Research Council. “They’re saying simply and merely the possession of it, in a presidential home after his presidency, where he had the power to declassify it, is somehow criminal and warrants up to 400 years in prison? Is this the United States of America or is this Venezuela?”
In an interview later, Fallon questioned the end result of the prosecution.
He predicted an acquittal would propel the former president back into the White House, but added the most likely outcome is that the polarization around Trump creeps into the courtroom and results in a hung jury. It would then be up to prosecutors whether to try the case again, with potentially the same outcome.
“At some point, you just gotta let it go,” Fallon said. “And maybe just take stuff back that you want and call it a day.”
Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, asserted Monday night that the Biden administration “weaponized the entire federal government against President Trump” as a “massive diversion” from allegations that Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe when he was vice president from an executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
That’s an increasingly common GOP refrain.
Through aides, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving, declined an interview request Monday but on Friday she called the indictment “a blatant and disgraceful political hit job” intended to deflect attention from the purported “Biden bribery cover-up.”
The Justice Department looked into a tip and did not find sufficient evidence to open an investigation. The president Biden called the allegation “malarkey” last week, noting there’s no trace of the money.
Sen. Ted Cruz echoed a common GOP assertion that Trump is the victim of a double standard, with Trump getting treated far more harshly for mishandling secrets than Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
As for why more Republicans in Congress aren’t speaking up for Trump, he said: “You have to ask them.”
The senator was more pointed on his latest podcast, on which he called the indictment “pretty underwhelming.”
“They don’t like defending Trump,” Cruz said — especially his rivals for the GOP nomination — but “if you’re a Republican, whether you like Trump or don’t like Trump, you look at this and this is such obvious garbage.”
“We’ve all seen the picture of the boxes stacked up in the marble bathroom with the chandelier. And there’s something titillating about that. That’s an odd place to store classified documents, in the shower,” Cruz said. “Is that any more embarrassing than in a cardboard box in a garage next to an antique Corvette? That would be where Joe Biden kept his documents.”
But Biden quickly turned over the sensitive documents that surfaced at his home and office after the raid at Mar-a-Lago. So did former Vice President Mike Pence.
Legal experts note that prosecutors took pains to focus on documents that Trump hid or withheld after federal authorities had given him every chance to cooperate.
That makes Trump’s behavior unparalleled.
“The obstruction claims are where the greatest legal peril is,” Cruz said on his podcast.
Rep. Chip Roy of Austin — a former prosecutor who accused Trump after Jan. 6 of committing an impeachable offense by trying to pressure Pence to overturn their defeat — called the indictment of a former president a “massive breaking of norms.”
“It’s pretty spectacularly clear that one individual is being targeted and maybe the same standard isn’t being applied to everybody,” said Roy, who supports Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for the GOP nomination.
But he said he hadn’t read the indictment closely enough to form an opinion on the strength of the case.
“I’ll try to call balls and strikes here but that, I think, counsels not getting ahead of a thorough reading of the indictment and all the facts,” he said.
Like Roy, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Waco, echoed Republicans’ concerns about selective prosecution and a double standard being applied to Trump. He added that the case will likely consume a significant amount of Trump’s time and attention.
“These are serious issues that he’s going to have to resolve,” he said.
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