It was not a good week for the GOP
It kind of ended well. Otherwise, it was a bumpy ride, a frightful and frightening week for Republicans.
“I failed to do my due diligence,” Jenna Ellis said in an Atlanta courtroom. “… I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse.”
What Ellis viewed with such retrospective regret was her association with former president Donald Trump. Attorney and media celebrity, Ellis helped spread the fraudulent notion that Trump won the 2020 election.
Charged by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis with violations of Georgia’s racketeering statute, Ellis copped a plea that includes the promise to testify truthfully in any future Atlanta court case in which her testimony may be relevant, such as the scheduled trial of the presumptive Republican nominee for president in 2024, the former president himself.
Ellis wiped away tears as she neared the end of her statement of remorse delivered in court. “If I had known then (November-December 2020) what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in the post-election” period, she said.
As part of her plea deal, Ellis is required to write a letter of apology to the people of Georgia for her misdeeds, which she said was a result of not inquiring deeply enough about the true outcome of the vote in Georgia, won on the square by Joe Biden.
Ellis wasn’t alone in her comeuppance. Earlier, Trump champions Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both attorneys and both ensnared by Trump in the plot to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia (and elsewhere, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona), entered pleas that will keep them out of jail.
Like Ellis, Powell and Chesebro promised to tell the truth and the whole truth at future trials on the Georgia charges.
That includes, at this point at least, the trial of former Republican congressman and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who reportedly copped his own deal in the federal investigation of the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.
It was reported last week that Meadows is now cooperating with special prosecutor Jack Smith, who is probing Trump on two fronts – for the Jan. 6 affair and for the official documents caper that occurred after Trump left office.
Granted immunity by Smith, Meadows, according to ABC News, testified to the federal grand jury examining the Jan. 6 assault on democracy. Among the things Meadows shared with Smith and his team of Department of Justice investigators was that he told Trump more than once that presidential allegations of widespread and consequential voter fraud were just not true.
Meadows told Smith and company that he was informing Trump by mid-December 2020 that the well of misdeeds the president was pumping for was as dry as dry can be – as it always had been. Despite this, Trump continued on his not so merry way to Jan. 6.
None of these developments, of course, bode well for Trump, who was fined $10,000 by the judge in his New York civil trial – adding to a $5,000 speaking-out-of-turn fine previously levied. The case involves the inflating of the value of Trump properties in order to secure bank loans the ex-real estate tycoon took out.
Filing last week for the New Hampshire presidential primary, Trump ludicrously compared himself to the super heroic Nelson Mandela, adding, “We got to save our country from the … lunatics.”
Who was he talking about? Fellow-Republicans? Democrats? Perhaps the answer is anyone in opposition to him.
Finally, we come to the Republican House speaker debacle which ended on Thursday in a note of triumphant for Mike Johnson. An otherwise obscure member from Louisiana, Johnson was chosen by the GOP House conference after a 21-day speaker vacancy.
Three speaker nominees came and went before Johnson was selected. Amidst the squabbling, Fox News’ reporter Aishah Hasnie, writing the sentence of the week, posted, “It smells like burritos, cigarettes, and broken dreams in the hallway outside the GOP conference forum.”
The apogee of the selection process may have come at a press conference featuring Johnson and, as things turned, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. Asked by a reporter whether he had regrets about voting against certifying Biden as president, Johnson waved off a reply. Instantly, Foxx snarled, to the reporter, “Shut up! Shut up!” while a chorus of approving boos from the knot of Republicans surrounding the new speaker was hurled the reporter’s way.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.