I wondered what all that BS was about Trump wanting the Senate Republicans to fight. Trump wants the Senate Republicans to basically throw show trials about Democratic wrongdoings in order to defend Trump from impeachment.
"Senate Republicans don't have to defend Trump on everything, they just have to do their jobs,” said one senior Trump operative. “Part of that is holding hearings, calling witnesses, and forcing testimony on the misdeeds we already know about—Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 election against Trump, the Clinton campaign paying foreign sources to fabricate a dossier against Trump, the politically driven Kavanaugh smear campaign, the son of the former vice president influence-trading overseas, Adam Schiff trying to obtain dirt on Trump from the Ukrainian embassy, and more. What good is controlling half of Congress if Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff get to run the whole show anyway?"
Trump wants the Republicans in the Senate to chase after conspiracy theories.
Now, Republicans are stalling on this because they are complaining that they are not getting the needed show trial scripts from Trump.
For all the grumbling, however, the White House has appeared to have done very little to chart out a hearing process of their own. Graham has floated the idea of calling Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to testify. But those plans appear far off—if not dead entirely—as Giuliani has receded from the spotlight.
Graham did not return a request for comment. But one senior Senate aide said that there has been little that the White House has offered that has given members there either direction or confidence.
“As far as I know, there are no emissaries on the Hill telling us what to say on this,” said the senior Senate GOP aide. “I'm not going to rule out any work on our side in terms of looking into other things that are sort of adjacent to the investigations going on. But there is just not a lot of appetite among Senate Republicans. They are not very enthusiastic about defending the indefensible on this stuff.”
Which is the real crux of this problem. But why let the truth get in the way of a good story? Trump always has William Barr to help out.
With little counterprogramming being planned currently by Senate Republicans, much of the White House’s focus has drifted to other investigations that could shift the focus away from Trump. In particular, there is hope that a Department of Justice probe into the origins of the 2016 investigation into Trump and Russian electoral interference could turn up findings problematic for several prominent Democrats, chief among them Obama’s former CIA Director John Brennan.
And to placate Fox “News” and Trump, one of Trump’s Senate sycophants — Rand Paul- was throwing another sycophant — Graham- — under the bus:
Paul, one of the president’s most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill these days, suggested that Graham and other Republican senators were more loyal to the so-called Deep State than to Trump, adding that the South Carolina senator may want the Deep State to “maintain their power and maintain the intelligence community’s enormous grip.”
Deep State. Gotta love it!