Amid campaign turmoil, the Florida governor said on Fox News Tuesday that he supports the effort to impeach President Biden.
Earlier this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy indicated that he is supportive of an impeachment inquiry of President Biden moving forward, after he was skeptical of such a move previously, even as various members of Congress have introduced impeachment resolutions.
An inquiry, McCarthy said on Fox News, would give Republicans “the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed.” He did not necessarily say that he is supportive of actually impeaching Biden, but that an impeachment inquiry should move forward.
Ron DeSantis Says Impeachment for Joe Biden
In his own appearance on Fox this week, Gov. Ron DeSantis, the presidential candidate, was asked by host Jesse Watters if he supports an impeachment inquiry, “over the bribes and the corruption.” DeSantis responded that he does.
“They impeached Trump for a phone call! Are you trying to tell me Biden’s conduct isn’t as significant as that? It’s WAY more significant,” DeSantis said on the show, very much mischaracterizing what Trump’s first impeachment was actually about.
“The corruption that’s surrounding this family is really unprecedented in the modern history of our country. And the lack of interest on this from the FBI and the Department of Justice, it shows you [with] weaponization there’s two sides to the coin,” he added.
It was another example of DeSantis reflexively defending Donald Trump, the man he is running against for president. And on the same day, Trump’s campaign expressed his appreciation for the support by sending a press release alleging that DeSantis is “colluding with Biden’s weaponized DOJ to stop President Trump and the MAGA movement.”
How is Ron DeSantis “colluding” with the Justice Department? According to the Trump statement, they have “resorted to directly parroting the talking points of radical Leftists,” How so? the statement cites a “top DeSantis fundraiser” who claimed that the DeSantis’ campaign’s “strategy… relied on endless political prosecutions of President Trump by radical Leftist prosecutors.”
That was a reference to Hal Lambert, a DeSantis fundraiser who told NBC News that additional Trump indictments will impact the nominating contest, and that “there is a possibility” that such legal battles would force Trump out of the race.
“If another indictment out of D.C. comes,” Lambert told NBC, “for example, I could see them fast-tracking that before the end of the year.”
How such a statement, from a donor, amounts to DeSantis himself “colluding” with Trump’s prosecutors is an odd charge to level, especially since DeSantis has more often than not defended Trump after his indictments.
There was more bad news for DeSantis’ campaign on Tuesday. They announced that they had fired a communications staffer, Nate Hochman, who had posted a video that imposed footage of the candidate over a Nazi symbol.
“Nate Hochman is no longer with the campaign,” a campaign official told NBC News. “And we will not be commenting on him further.” It was part of a wider culling of staffers from the DeSantis campaign operation, although dropping a staffer because he incorporated the candidate into Nazi iconography is certainly the sort of thing that didn’t always happen in mainstream American politics.
Hochman had been semi-prominent in conservative circles, previously working for National Review before he jumped to the DeSantis campaign, Semafor said. Axios further reported that Hochman had actually personally produced the Sonnenrad video, rather than merely sharing it.
This follows a controversy last month in which a DeSantis-associated account shared what was widely considered an anti-LGBTQ video, which accused Trump of having been too friendly to that community during his presidency, in contrast with specific legislation that DeSantis has signed. The New York Times reported last weekend that that video had also, in fact, been produced internally and made to look like it came from the outside, although the Times did not name the staffer who made that video.
Author Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
From 19FortyFive
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