GOP defends Trump as legal issues mount
Critic sees court filings as dire sign for the president.
Republicans on Sunday defended President Trump amid mounting legal issues stemming from the special counsel probe led by Robert Mueller III, with some brushing aside new court filings that detail previously unreported contacts between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign and implicate the president in plans to buy women’s silence.
In an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., played down the alleged campaign finance violations detailed by prosecutors, arguing that such missteps should not be “over-criminalized.”
“I personally think that if someone makes an error in filing paperwork or not categorizing, it shouldn’t be jail time, it ought to be a fine,” Paul said. He added that if campaign finance violations are aggressively prosecuted, “we’re going to become a banana republic, where every president gets prosecuted and every president gets thrown in jail when they’re done with office.”
The senator also said that there was nothing illegal about Trump’s efforts to build a hotel in Moscow during the 2016 campaign, so long as he didn’t promise anything in exchange for it.
Buzzfeed News reported last month that conversations about the project also allegedly included discussion of giving a $50 million penthouse to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Friday, federal prosecutors filed new court papers implicating Trump in plans to buy the silence of women who might go public with allegations of affairs with him. The documents also alleged that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, told prosecutors about what appeared to be a previously unknown November 2015 contact with a Russian national who offered the Trump campaign “synergy on a government level.”
Democrats, meanwhile, argued that Friday’s court filings are a dire sign for the president.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who is poised to take over as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in the new Congress, said that the alleged campaign finance violations “would be impeachable offenses” but that “whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question.”