Ask any incumbent House Democrats what they thought about the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, and your likelihood of getting a response probably depended on how safe they were in their seat.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was more than happy to endorse the search in Mar-a-Lago on Monday, which Fox News reported was in response to a complaint by the National Archives and Records Administration regarding materials Trump brought to his estate after his presidency had ended.
On Tuesday morning, she told NBC’s “Today” show that “no person is above the law. Not even the president of the United States. Not even a former president of the United States.”
However, the House leader conceded she didn’t “know very much about it.” Which is funny, because that’s precisely the same thing the most vulnerable members of her House caucus were willing to say — if they said anything at all.
On Tuesday, Fox News reported that the network had contacted every one of the 21 House Democrats who are running in seats that analysts have either deemed “toss-ups,” “lean Republican or “likely Republican” in the 2022 midterms this November. Fox asked them what they thought of the raid.
“None of them answered,” Fox News noted in the article, which was published Tuesday evening.
Actually, according to Fox, out of the 21, there was one weasel-worded response, from the office of Democratic Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada. But it still wasn’t much of an answer.
“We are continuing to monitor this developing situation,” her spokeswoman said, without betraying any position.
Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, while she didn’t necessarily respond to Fox News, also made it known that she thought the raid was “unprecedented” — but so was Donald Trump, apparently, so everything’s hunky-dory.
The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago is an unprecedented action in reaction to an unprecedented presidency.
We have never had a president who sought to overturn an election and summon a mob to DC as Donald Trump did on January 6th. pic.twitter.com/eFfEy4KPvo
— Rep. Elaine Luria (@RepElaineLuria) August 9, 2022
“The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago is an unprecedented action in reaction to an unprecedented presidency. We have never had a president who sought to overturn an election and summon a mob to DC as Donald Trump did on January 6th,” Luria, a member of the House Jan. 6 committee, wrote in a tweet. She included a clip of herself on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” show saying something materially similar.
In that appearance, Luria, whose race is considered a “toss-up,” according to Townhall, justified the suspicion of Trump by rattling off a series of claims regarding the former president’s treatment of documents, including “another reporting of one of his aides saying he had eaten documents.”
She doesn’t mention who made this dubious allegation — White House aide and “The Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman, who will not go down as one of the best hires in the history of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Will the Monday raid hurt Democrats in the midterms?
After she was fired in 2018, she became one of numerous Republicans who became professional former-Trumpers, telling anyone who would listen (and would either pay them or elevate their profile), how they’d Seen The Light™.
Luria doesn’t see fit to mention, I notice, the dubious nature of the allegation that an accomplished, billionaire businessman and president of the United States didn’t have any better way of disposing of documents than munching on them. Nor does she mention that Manigault Newman committed a significant breach of security when she secretly recorded her firing by then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
“Former national security officials said it was not clear whether Ms. Manigault Newman had broken any laws, but she certainly violated the rules around what is supposed to be one of the most secure rooms in the capital,” The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported in 2018. (She was never charged.)
But I digress. Another Luria tweet — in which she wrote there was “no way to defend Trump, only to deflect” in response to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s statement that Attorney General Merrick Garland should “preserve [his] documents and clear [his] calendar — illustrated the danger that vulnerable Democrats face when championing a politically tinged raid.
Here was Luria’s opponent, Republican Jen Kiggans, in a Tuesday tweet: “The dangerous precedent the Democrats set yesterday by weaponizing the FBI should anger and frighten every American. All to settle old political scores and silence their political opponents – it’s corrupt and it’s flat out unacceptable.”
Unfortunately, it’s no surprise that Elaine Luria has found a way to justify this blatant and flagrant abuse of power. We cannot stand for this…Republicans must take back the House this November to ensure this never happens again.
— Jen Kiggans (@JenKiggans) August 9, 2022
“Unfortunately, it’s no surprise that Elaine Luria has found a way to justify this blatant and flagrant abuse of power,” she continued. “We cannot stand for this … Republicans must take back the House this November to ensure this never happens again.”
If there was any chance the Democrats would hold on to the House of Representatives in November, it involved harnessing outrage over Roe v. Wade being overturned and the failure of voting and abortion rights bills in the Senate due to Democrats not willing to jettison the filibuster — along with the hope Republicans would stay complacent and stay home.
We may not know much about what preceded Monday’s events, but we know enough that a raid on a former president’s estate is without precedent in this country — and it’s all supposedly over a public records dispute? Think Republicans are going to stay home now?
Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to get booted from her sinecure in the People’s Republic of San Francisco. That’s why she’s out there insisting there was “justification” for the raid — because “to have a visit like that, you need a warrant. To have a warrant, you need justification.” (That’s the preposterously circular logic she gave to the folks at “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, according to Fox News.)
For the rest of the most vulnerable 21 Democrats, it behooves them to say nothing at all. They’ve no doubt seen Elaine Luria’s Twitter feed and MSNBC appearances, which should almost count as an in-kind donation to her opponent. For the other 20 desperate Dems, they serve as an object lesson: Don’t do that.
