In response to the attempt this week by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to shield Jan. 6 attack participants from legal sanction, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell had a blunt assessment.
Johnson, O’Donnell said, is an “accessory after the fact” for Donald Trump and “is the most pro-crime speaker in the history of the House of Representatives.”
What provoked O’Donnell’s ire were comments Johnson made on Tuesday. He’s in the process of releasing cherry-picked, heavily edited footage from the deadly Trump-incited January 2021 attacks, and among other things has been blurring the faces of the rioters. In a press conference, Johnson admitted, unambiguously, that his goal is to shield those people from criminal prosecution.
“We don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said Tueasday.
“That is the first time in history that a speaker of the House has said that he doesn’t want people who committed federal crimes to be charged by the Department of Justice,” O’Donnell said after playing a clip of Johnson’s comment. “That is the mission of an accessory after the fact. And accessory after the fact is trying to prevent the apprehension of criminals, trying to prevent the punishment of criminals.”
O’Donnell contrasted Johnson’s vows to hire more people to help him in that effort with his attempts to gut enforcement of U.S. tax law.
“Mike Johnson, who wants to fire IRS workers who investigate federal tax crimes, has hired new federal workers to cover up crimes. Mike Johnson is the most pro-crime speaker in the history of the House of Representatives,” he said.
“In fact, he’s the only one. He’s the only one who has ever publicly admitted to participating and leading a cover-up of federal crimes,” O’Donnell continued. “The speaker seems to think that he’s not technically guilty of being an accessory after the fact, because the Justice Department already has all of this video without any blurred faces of the Trump=crazed criminals attacking the Capitol. But the truth is, throughout the history of American law enforcement citizens have been identifying criminals for law enforcement officials that the officials could not identify themselves.”
Bolstering that point, O’Donnell noted how many of the criminals who attempted to overthrow the goverment on Donald Trump’s behalf have only been brought to justice because they were identified by civilians through publicly released footage.
“Mike Johnson wants to prevent all of that. Mike Johnson wants to stop every one of those arrests that can still be made because an alert citizen makes a call to the FBI. He wants to stop possibly hundreds of arrests that could be made,” O’Donnell explained.
O’Donnell warned that a problem here is that Johnson is “better at lying than Donald Trump, much, much, much better,” noting that Trump “has sounded like a liar every day of his life. He has never once sounded like anything but a pathological liar to me, going back decades before he became a politician.”
Johnson, meanwhile, “sounds like your accountant telling you how much your mortgage deduction is going to be this year.”
“His face could not be straighter when he says that … Mike Johnson, with his nonthreatening accountant-like demeanor, delivers Trumpian lies without the fireworks, and he’s going to be an active member of the Republican Party for decades after Donald Trump’s funeral.”
You can watch the entire segment at the top of the page now.
