GOP’s usual embrace of Trump muted after criminal referral
Published:Tuesday | December 20, 2022 | 8:04 AM
NEW YORK (AP) — Support for former US president Donald Trump appears to have waned among members of the Republican Party following the January 6 House committee vote to recommend the Justice Department bring criminal charges against him.
Members of the party quickly and forcefully rallied behind Trump in the hours after federal agents seized classified documents from his Florida estate this summer.
However, four months later, that sense of intensity and urgency was missing, at least for now.
Leading Republicans largely avoided the historic criminal referral Monday, while others pressed to weigh in offered muted defenses — or none at all.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Trump critic who suggested the former president likely benefited, politically, at least, from the FBI's summertime search of his Florida home, said Trump was at least partly responsible for the deadly attack on the Capitol.
“No man is above the law,” Hogan told The Associated Press shortly before the committee's vote.
The divergent responses are a sign of how quickly the political landscape has shifted for Trump as he faces a new legal threat and mounts a third bid for the presidency.
It's a marked change for a party that has been defined, above all, by its unconditional loyalty to Trump under any and all circumstances for the last six years.
Monday's hearing of the January 6 House committee, comprised of seven Democrats and two Republican Trump critics, likely marks Congress' final attempt to hold the former president accountable for the attack on the US Capitol by hundreds of his loyalists as elected officials worked to certify President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory.
The criminal referral, which is nonbinding, is the culmination of a yearlong investigation that included more than 1,000 witnesses, 10 televised public hearing and over 1 million documents.
The committee, which Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy boycotted and dismissed as a “sham process,” will formally disband on January 3 as Republicans take over the House majority.
Ever defiant, Trump predicted the criminal referral would ultimately help him.
“These folks don't get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger,” Trump said in a statement posted on his social network, condemning the criminal referral as “a partisan attempt to sideline me and the Republican Party.”
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