GOP senator admits Trump 'might be involved in a crime'

As evidence piles up that Trump may have committed multiple felonies, even Trump’s stalwart Republican allies are beginning to question his innocence.

“Am I concerned that the president might be involved in a crime? Of course,” Republican Bill Cassidy, the senior senator from Louisiana, told reporters on Tuesday.

NBC News reports that comments like this show “cracks in what has been a solid wall of support for Trump” after Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to two felonies and testified that Trump directed him to arrange illegal hush money payments to women Trump had had affairs with.

Cassidy also said he thinks the only question is “whether or not this so-called hush money is a crime.”

The payments would indeed be a crime if they were intended to help Trump’s campaign without being disclosed as a campaign expense.

Multiple former Trump allies, including Cohen, say this is exactly what happened — that the payments were a deliberate effort to keep the women from going public with damaging stories about Trump that could hurt his chances in the election.

Cohen’s testimony on this point is now corroborated by executives at AMI, the company that owns the National Enquirer. AMI struck a deal to avoid prosecution in exchange for admitting that it participated in Trump’s illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election.

A federal judge described the actions of Cohen and Trump as “an insidious crime to our democratic institutions.”

While many Republicans have sought to downplay the severity of these alleged crimes, NBC News reports Cassidy isn’t alone in questioning Trump.

After months of overwhelming evidence showing Trump was engaged in nefarious activity, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was also forced to tepidly admit Trump could face consequences for committing crimes.

“If someone has violated the law, the application of the law should be applied to them like it would to any other citizen in this country, and obviously if you’re in a position of great authority like the presidency that would be the case,” Rubio said over the weekend.

Still, while the damning evidence against Trump is belatedly forcing some Republicans to weakly reckon with the truth, most of the Republican Party continues to stand by Trump and even defend his likely criminal activity.

Utah’s retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch actually came out and said, “I don’t care” that Trump broke the law.

Complicit Republicans, like outgoing Speaker Paul Ryan, have spent the entirety of Trump’s tenure in the White House covering up for his crimes.

That’s one reason the American people, sick of a Congress without a backbone, ousted the Republican House majority in favor of a new Democratic majority led by Nancy Pelosi.

And unlike Republicans, that new Democratic majority in the House isn’t going to ignore evidence that Trump broke the law and cheated in order to win the 2016 election.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.