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McConnell already raising money after declaring ‘case closed’ on Mueller report
By NIELS LESNIEWSKI CQ-Roll Call
May 07, 2019 01:00 AM
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WASHINGTON
After Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came to the Senate floor to declare “case closed” on Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia, his campaign quickly started raising money.
“Mitch just told the Democrats to end their Russia conspiracy spectacle and accept there was no collusion. CASE CLOSED,” said a fundraising message from the Kentucky Republican’s 2020 re-election campaign Tuesday morning.
The campaign, which shared the fundraising request on Twitter along with a photo of McConnell alongside a grinning Trump, said in the words of McConnell, “Today, I went to the Senate floor to tell the Democrats: it’s time to finally end this spectacle, come back to reality, and accept there was no collusion. Donate if you agree!”
The headline-grabbing part of McConnell’s floor speech was referring specifically to the report of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III pertaining to any possible conspiracy between President Donald Trump and Russia during the course of the 2016 campaign.
“Two years of exhaustive investigation, and nothing to establish the fanciful conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians and TV talking heads had treated like a foregone conclusion. They told everyone there’d been a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign,” McConnell said in his floor speech. “Yet on this central question, the special counsel’s finding is clear: Case closed. Case closed.”
McConnell went on to criticize the treatment of Attorney General William Barr by congressional Democrats.
“The claims get more and more utterly absurd. Baseless accusations of perjury. Laughable threats of impeachment. Look, we all know what’s going on here. This is the whole angry barrage that Democrats had prepared to unleash on President Trump. Except the facts let them down,” McConnell said.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York responded to the central message of McConnell’s speech.
“Senator McConnell’s declaration of ‘case closed’ is a stunning act of political cynicism and a brazen violation of the oath we all take,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a statement. “The Special Counsel report laid out eleven instances of the President’s obstruction, and left a raft of unanswered questions about coordination between the President’s campaign and Russia. These are not trivial or political questions – they go to the wellspring of our democracy.”