The list of flimsy excuses and desperate explanations keeps growing for Donald Trump’s unlawful possession of highly classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago compound. Members of Congress and other Republican influentials keep falling all over themselves either to minimize the importance of the documents, blame the FBI for a witch hunt against Trump, or even to suggest that it was the FBI’s delays in searching Mar-a-Lago — not Trump’s possession of secret documents there — that endangered national security. But the one culprit who never seems to come up for blame in their accounting is Trump himself.
For members of Congress, the more they appear to be defending one man’s lawlessness and impunity, the more they betray their sworn duty to defend the Constitution and the law of the land. The most recent round of excuse-making comes courtesy of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who wondered aloud in a television interview why all the commotion over a simple “storage argument.” He added: “I don’t think a fight over storage of documents is worthy of what they’ve done, which is (a) full-scale raid and then these constant leaks.”
Rubio falsely asserted that Justice Department officials “don’t deny that he should have access to those documents.” They do, in fact, insist he had no business possessing them. One document in particular reportedly contained intelligence about other countries’ nuclear defense capabilities.
