Ex-RNC Chair Blasts ‘Un-American’ GOP Senators For Taking An Oath They Know They Won’t Keep

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, unloaded on GOP senators on Thursday, saying they should ashamed of themselves for taking an oath they don’t plan to keep.

During a discussion with MSNBC’s Brian Williams and Nicolle Wallace, Steele said Republicans have already admitted they won’t be impartial in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, so taking an oath they know they will violate is “un-American.”

“They should be embarrassed to stand there and take the oath of office when they’ve already told us they plan to lie when they do so,” Steele said.

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Steele said:

The question is whether or not you can slice out pieces of votes to cobble together a coalition of the willing, who want to willingly have an open trial that would allow for witnesses and documents and testimony because they’re more interested in the truth, they’re more interested in knowing whether or not what has been alleged did, in fact, occur the way it did, or whether this was, in fact, a witch-hunt. See, that’s the part that rubs me here is that if the president had the perfect phone call, Republican senators, then put forth the testimony to back that up, then put forth the witnesses to back that up. But all you have done since the beginning of this whole thing is to shut down and to project and, in fact, say openly, ‘I don’t even want to care about the evidence.’ Lindsey Graham: ‘I don’t care about the evidence. I’m not even looking at the evidence.’ So don’t stand in the chamber today and take the oath. Take your behind out of the chamber when it’s time to swear in because you will be lying to the American people because you’ve already told us you plan not to be an honest juror. So this is almost a joke in the sense that you have some of these senators walking into this room, standing in front of the country, standing in front of the chief justice of the United States, raising their damn hand to swear an oath that they know they’re not going to defend nor uphold. And so what signal does that send to the American people? It says to us that the rule of law, the process of jurisprudence in whatever form it takes doesn’t matter, at least for some. … That’s the responsibility at this moment that I think a lot of these members are going to let slip by and it’s, quite frankly, Brian and Nicolle, disgusting. It’s un-American. And they should be embarrassed to stand there and take the oath of office when they’ve already told us they plan to lie when they do so.

Most GOP senators are happily violating their oath

Since day one of this impeachment saga, most Republican senators have refused to even listen when confronted with the damning and indisputable evidence that Donald Trump violated his oath office.

If there was any doubt remaining that the president was extorting Ukraine into helping him cheat in another election, it all went away after Rachel Maddow’s explosive Wednesday night interview with Lev Parnas in which the former Rudy Giuliani associate corroborated all the damning testimony we heard during the impeachment inquiry.

But again, most Republicans are unmoved by the increasingly troubling evidence against the president. They know that being an impartial juror will mean they have to remove Donald Trump – a president who now owns the GOP – from office.

They’d rather violate their oath than let that happen.

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