House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a baffling defense Wednesday for Donald Trump’s blatant corruption schemes, seeming to forget entirely about so-called congressional oversight.
During a press conference, Johnson was asked whether he was at all concerned about the Trump family’s foreign business dealings, in light of the president’s trip to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week, where his family has made billions in investments, as well as Trump’s contentious plan to throw an “intimate dinner” for the top holders of his meme coin.
“Look, there are authorities that—police, executive branch, ethics rules—I’m not an expert in that. My expertise is in the House,” Johnson said.
“I’ll say that the reason many people refer to the Bidens as the ‘Biden crime family’ is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains, but in the back rooms; they were trying to conceal it, and they repeatedly lied about it, and they set up shell companies, and the family was all engaged in getting all on the dole,” Johnson said. “Whatever the President Trump is doing is out in the open, they’re not trying to conceal anything.”
Setting aside the simple fact that in an expansive 300-page report released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee last year, the GOP failed to produce a single piece of irrefutable evidence demonstrating that Joe Biden had participated in or benefited from foreign deals made by his family, it’s nearly impossible to parse why someone would believe that engaging in corruption out in the open is any better than doing it in secret.
Johnson had fully supported the lengthy, and ultimately fruitless, impeachment inquiry into Biden but condemned Democrats who sought impeachment of Trump in 2019. It seems the issue is not the act but the man at the center.
The reporter reminded Johnson that there were shady things happening behind closed doors in the Trump administration too, such as allowing more than 200 wealthy individuals to anonymously buy access to the White House by lining the president’s pockets.
“I don’t know anything about the meme coin thing. I don’t know, I can just tell you, I mean President Trump has had nothing to hide; he’s very upfront about it. There are people who watch all the ethics of that, but I mean I’ve got to be concerned with running the House of Representatives—” Johnson said.
The reporter interrupted him to gently remind the speaker that oversight was a congressional responsibility.
“Congress has an oversight responsibility, but I think, so far as I know the ethics are all being followed,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s defense of Trump boiled down to, “Yeah, he may be breaking the rules, but he’s doing it where I can see it. So who cares?”
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