After a jury found him guilty on 34 felony counts, Donald Trump knew exactly who to call for a solution: House Speaker Mike Johnson.
In a conversation reportedly laced with F-bombs, Trump urged the Louisiana Republican to find a political solution for his legal comeuppance, Politico reported Thursday.
“We have to overturn this,” Trump told a sympathetic Johnson, according to Politico.
Johnson already believed that the House had a role to play in overturning Trump’s conviction, but since that call, he’s practically done backflips to make it happen. During an interview on Fox and Friends last month, Johnson urged the Supreme Court to “step in” and overturn the jury’s verdict.
“I think that the justices on the court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight,” Johnson said, before effectively promising to viewers that the nation’s highest court would step in to make the ruling go away. “This will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it; it’s just going to take some time to do it.”
The House Speaker is looking to unravel Trump’s other criminal charges, as well. Johnson is reportedly examining using the appropriations process to target special counsel Jack Smith’s probe, and is already in talks with Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan to do so. It’s a near reversal of a position he took early last month, when Johnson told Politico that a similar idea proposed by Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene would be “unworkable.”
“That country certainly sees what’s going on, and they don’t want Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg and these kinds of folks to be able to continue to use grant dollars for targeting people in a political lawfare type of way,” Jordan told the publication.
But other Republicans aren’t exactly on board with the idea of defunding the special counsel—even if they disagree with the case against Trump.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea unless you can show that [the prosecutors] acted in bad faith or fraud or something like that,” Idaho Representative Mike Simpson told Politico. “They’re just doing their job—even though I disagree with what they did.”
Another, unnamed Republican went even further in torching the effort, claiming that attacking Smith’s case would completely undermine their calls against Democrats for “weaponizing” the justice system to their political benefit.
