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A few Republicans are getting nervous about their party inciting attacks on the FBI [1]
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Date: 2022-08-15
Republican politicians who aren’t interested in being blamed for a fatal attack on an FBI agent or members of their family, but who also aren’t willing to lose their Trump loyalty badges, are now trying to calibrate their rhetoric to blaming the Justice Department and the FBI without further encouraging violence.
In a Sunday CNN appearance, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson tried to deflect rage from the FBI onto the Justice Department. “We need to pull back on casting judgment on them,” Hutchinson said. “If you want to hold people accountable, it is the Department of Justice. It is the attorney general who said he supervised that. The FBI is simply carrying out their responsibilities under the law.”
(Psst: So are the Justice Department and attorney general.)
On CBS, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent, similarly tried to deflect attention to the Justice Department, joining calls for it to release the affidavit supporting the search warrant. Such an affidavit usually isn’t released until charges are filed (if they are filed), but, according to Fitzpatrick, “It was an unprecedented action that needs to be supported by unprecedented justification.” He also very gently suggested that perhaps some Republicans should tone it down, saying, “I have urged all my colleagues to make sure they understand the weight of their words.”
“We’re the world’s oldest democracy, and the only way that can come unraveled is if we have disrespect for institutions that lead to Americans turning on Americans,” Fitzpatrick also said, adding, “A lot of that starts with the words we’re using.”
Fitzpatrick is an elected official from a party with a leader who attempted a coup and is now under investigation for taking top secret documents and refusing to return them. It seems like we’re past the “starts with the words we’re using” point. But in keeping with current Republican practice, when asked directly about threats of violence, he pivoted to the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball practice and did not specifically mention the attack just days before on an FBI office.
In a show of what passes for independence in today’s Republican Party, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who has publicly broken with Trump, dared to mention that attack on the FBI office.
The leader of the Republican Party and his allies encouraged a coup attempt. Many Republicans have spent nearly two years undermining the results of the election their leader tried to overturn. They responded to a search of one of his properties for classified documents with a blizzard of shifting and often contradictory excuses for why Trump either didn’t take the documents or had every right to take the documents or was just doing what Democrats before him had done. In many cases, those excuses were accompanied by incendiary attacks on the FBI and Justice Department. The tepid backpedaling by a very few Republicans does not absolve their party.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/15/2116709/-A-few-Republicans-are-getting-nervous-about-their-party-inciting-attacks-on-the-FBI
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