Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell backed the federal charges against former President Donald Trump in connection to the January 6 Capitol riot and said he hoped Trump would “pay a price” for the attack, according to an upcoming biography.
McConnell has been critical of the former president for years - while also still somehow backing him publicly - stating his support for Special Counsel Jack Smith in 2023.
“If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is,” McConnell told Michael Tackett for the book, The Price of Power. McConnell made the comment just weeks after Smith filed the charges in August last year.
The book is set to be published a week before the election.
“From the start, McConnell thought the charges brought by federal prosecutors against Trump had merit,” the journalist writes, according to Axios.
“There’s no doubt who inspired it, and I just hope that he’ll have to pay a price for it,” McConnell told Tackett about January 6.
According to the book, McConnell seriously considered voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. A conviction would have barred the former president from running again.
“I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense. I think it is,” McConnell said in comments provided to Tackett.
The minority leader said that supporting an insurrection and a siege of Congress “is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine.”
McConnell voted to acquit Trump, saying that he wasn’t eligible for conviction as he had already left office.
“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one,” he said at the time. However, the Supreme Court has since ruled that presidents have immunity from official actions while in office.
“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said in a statement, according to Axios.
McConnell officially endorsed Trump for president in March.
