By Steve Benen
There’s no longer any question about whether Donald Trump would seek prosecutions against his perceived political enemies. Not only does he keep publicly acknowledging his intentions — including in a new interview aired late yesterday — he’s trailed by a record of already having made such attempts.
The question, rather, is who he’d go after first. There’s reason to believe members of the Jan. 6 committee would be high on the former president’s list.
After U.S. District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols ordered former White House strategist Steve Bannon to report to prison on July 1, Trump found it difficult to lash out at the justice system. After all, he’s the one who tapped Nichols for the federal bench.
So the Republican did the next best thing: As NBC News reported, he lashed out at the members whose subpoena Bannon ignored.
In a post on his Truth Social website, Trump said the sentence is a “Total and Complete American Tragedy” and suggested that the members of the Jan. 6 committee be prosecuted instead.
In fact, given the relevant details, “suggested” is a generous description.
“It is a Total and Complete American Tragedy that the Crooked Joe Biden Department of Injustice is so desperate to jail Steve Bannon, and every other Republican, for that matter, for not SUBMITTING to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, made up of all Democrats, and two CRAZED FORMER REPUBLICAN LUNATICS, Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger, and Liz ‘Out of Her Mind’ Cheney,” the presumptive GOP nominee wrote on his social media platform.
The same hysterical screed added, “It has been irrefutably proven that it was the Unselects who committed actual crimes when they deleted and destroyed all material evidence, in a pathetic attempt to protect Crazy Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats from the TRUTH — THAT I DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG. The unAmerican Weaponization of our Law Enforcement has reached levels of Illegality never thought possible before.”
Trump concluded, “INDICT THE UNSELECT J6 COMMITTEE FOR ILLEGALLY DELETING AND DESTROYING ALL OF THEIR ‘FINDINGS!’”
There’s obviously no real point to fact-checking every individual error of fact and judgment in the former president’s harangue, but it’s probably worth pausing to note a few key elements.
First, the idea that the Jan. 6 committee illegally destroyed evidence is ridiculous.
Second, there is a degree of irony to Trump condemning the “weaponization” of law enforcement and demanding criminal indictments against his critics in successive sentences.
But even if we put these relevant details aside, the broader takeaway of the presumptive GOP nominee’s online rant is that he appears quite serious about wanting to prosecute the bipartisan group of lawmakers who investigated the Jan. 6 attack. In fact, yesterday wasn’t even the first such tirade: It was last summer when Trump started accusing members of the former House select panel of being “criminals” who engaged in “highly illegal” misconduct. He kept the offensive going for months, paying particular attention to former Rep. Liz Cheney.
“SHE SHOULD BE PROSECUTED FOR WHAT SHE HAS DONE TO OUR COUNTRY!” he wrote a few months ago, referring to the former Wyoming congresswoman. Trump added at the time, “She should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!”
To be sure, the Jan. 6 committee’s members have plenty of company — I long ago lost count of the number of people Trump has falsely accused of felonies — but that doesn’t change the unsettling set of circ*mstances: The former president is simultaneously talking about prosecuting his domestic foes and demanding indictments against those who investigated the Jan. 6 attack.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics."
