Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former president Donald Trump aren’t exactly best friends. That’s not a big secret.
But in a shocking revelation, McConnell revealed that he hopes his GOP rival will one day sit behind bars.
McConnell told journalist Michael Tackett in an interview last year that special counsel Jack Smith had a good case against Trump.
Mitch McConnell said he hopes Donald Trump will "pay a price" for Jan. 6 role, new book reveals https://t.co/GKL13brY0e
— The Hill (@thehill) October 22, 2024
“If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is,” McConnell said.
The interview was for The Price of Power, per Axios, which scheduled to be published next week.
“If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is,” McConnell told Tackett, weeks after special counsel Jack Smith brought the election subversion case against the former president, according to Axios.
McConnell recently said that he and Donald Trump are “on the same team now,” but this new revelation (straight from McConnell) indicates that McConnell felt otherwise behind closed doors.
In the book, Tackett reportedly reflected on the interview with McConnell, writing, “From the start, McConnell thought the charges brought by federal prosecutors against Trump had merit,” according to Axios, who obtained an early copy of the book.
Tackett reported on the extent to which McConnell was considering voting to convict Trump in the Senate, when the former president was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House after the Capitol attack. A conviction would have required two-thirds of the upper chamber’s votes; seven Republican senators joined all of their Democratic colleagues in voting to convict, falling short of the threshold.
Tackett reported on an oral history interview McConnell did a week after January 6, according to Axios, in which McConnell said he was “not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense,” adding, “I think it is.”
McConnell, however, ultimately voted against convicting the former president, saying Trump was no longer the president and could be held accountable by the criminal justice system or civil litigation, Axios reported.
“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said in a statement, provided by his office.
McConnell endorsed Trump for president in March.
But the support of Jack Smith’s case against Trump isn’t the only bombshell to come from McConnell in the new book.
McConnell also privately privately slammed Trump as “stupid,” “ill-tempered” and “a despicable human being” after the 2020 election, according to excerpts from the book set to be released later this month.
McConnell, who publicly feuded with Trump for much of the past four years, also criticized the former president as a “narcissist” and admitted after the 2020 election that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until he left office.
Trump said after the 2020 election that he did not like McConnell and accused him at times of foiling his agenda in Congress, even though McConnell helped pass the former president’s signature tax reform package and confirm three of his conservative nominees to the Supreme Court.
In a statement released by his PAC in February 2021, Trump declared: “The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm.”
He fumed that “Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling hack, and if Republicans are going to stay with him, they will not win again.”