He’s gathering the troops:
Confirming @JakeSherman: conservative Rep. Jim Banks, who chairs @RepublicanStudy, will take about a dozen RSC members to NJ tonight for dinner w/ Trump. Had been prev scheduled. But per 2 people fam., they expect to it to be a solidarity moment for DJT with House’s right flank.
Banks and RSC have become a power bloc in GOP over past year, pushing populist conservative policy memos and hosting potential 2024 candidates at their meetings, including Pence and Pompeo. But they’ve always stayed close with Trump, with staunch Trump allies filling the ranks.
Originally tweeted by Robert Costa (@costareports) on August 9, 2022.
Banks, of course, was one of the wingnuts McCarthy wanted to put on the January 6th Committee.
By the way::
Many of the Republicans aghast at the FBI raid had supported FBI probes of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in 2016. When then-FBI Director James B. Comey found no reason to charge Clinton after an initial investigation, and after another probe of emails on a laptop belonging to a Clinton aide shortly before the election, they asked whether the Democrat had gotten off easy.
“Secretary Clinton’s fundamental lack of judgment and wanton disregard for protecting and keeping information confidential raises continued questions about the exposure of our nation’s diplomatic and national security secrets,” McCarthy said in 2016, after Comey initially announced the end of the investigation.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a onetime Trump critic turned Trump defender during the 45th president’s tenure, said Monday on Twitter: “We’re 100 days away from midterm elections. President Trump is likely going to run again in 2024.” He added, “Launching such an investigation of a former President this close to an election is beyond problematic.”
Six years earlier, however, Graham was critical of the FBI after it found no crime to charge in its probe of Clinton’s email server.
“We need a special prosecutor, someone outside the Justice Department, to look into this matter,” said Graham in an August 2016 interview on Fox News, 75 days before that year’s presidential election. “If you’re waiting on this Justice Department to hold anybody in the Obama-Clinton world accountable, you’ll die of old age. It’s sad but it’s true.”
I’m sure we could dig up thousands of examples of Republicans railing against the FBI for failing to throw Clinton in leg irons for her alleged crime of mishandling classified information.