Se. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) called on Sunday for all the DOJ employees who worked on Trump indictments to be fired in the interest of accountability for using government resources to try to keep President-elect Donald Trump off the ballot.
“You saw all these cases resurrected. They all fell apart under the weight of the law,” Shmitt said on NBC's "Meet the Press." “And so I do think there needs to be accountability. I think that getting it back to crime fighting is important, but there has to be accountability for these kinds of abuses.”
Schmitt was then asked whether he was referring to the removal of special prosecutor Jack Smith or something more.
“I think accountability means, first and foremost, the people involved with this should be fired immediately,” he said. “And anybody a part of this, this effort to keep President Trump off the ballot, and to throw him in jail for the rest of his life because they didn’t like his politics, and to continue to cast him as a ‘threat to democracy,’ was wrong, and so we’ll see where that goes.”
“But I just don’t think in this country, unless we want to be a banana republic, I don’t want to see that happen. You can’t have the Justice Department abused in this way,” Schmitt added.
As everyone should know at this point, Trump was indicted four separate times, and two of those prosecutions were by the DOJ under President Joe Biden.
All of the indictments against him have either been suspended or dismissed since he won the 2024 election.
The New York case that found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying financial documents was scheduled for sentencing on November 18, but DA Alvin Bragg asked last week for sentencing to be postponed indefinitely.
Schmitt also praised Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, who replaced Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) after he withdrew from contention following allegations that he had solicited sex from a minor (which he adamantly denies).
Bondi will end the "weaponization" of the DOJ, Schmitt said.
Trump has vowed to gut the unelected "deep state," and House Republicans have been working toward this goal with their select committee on the weaponization of government since gaining the majority two years ago.
Ending the ability of the deep state or any administration to use lawfare against an opponent would be a big step back from what many feel is the edge of banana republic status for the U.S.
Bondi was one of Trump's lawyers during his first impeachment trial and served as Florida attorney general until 2019.
She vowed last year to prosecute the prosecutors that indicted Trump.
