The collapse of Paul Ingrassia’s Office of Special Counsel nomination is exposing an exasperated Senate GOP, where even the MAGA faithful can only be pushed so far by a president demanding total fealty.
Hours after President Donald Trump hosted Senate Republicans for Rose Garden cheeseburgers to thank them for helping staff his administration, Ingrassia announced Tuesday evening he was withdrawing from his scheduled confirmation hearing Thursday because he didn’t have enough GOP votes. The White House is now planning to file paperwork to nix his nomination, according to a White House official.
This week GOP senators took relatively provocative steps to signal their dismay with Ingrassia, after POLITICO reported on texts that showed him making racist and antisemitic remarks to fellow Republicans. It followed another POLITICO story earlier this month that reported Ingrassia, the White House liaison to DHS, had been the subject of a DHS internal investigation after a lower-ranking colleague filed, and later withdrew, a harassment complaint. (Ingrassia’s lawyer did not confirm the texts were authentic and denied wrongdoing by Ingrassia at DHS.)
What started with a subtle but striking warning Monday night from Senate Majority Leader John Thune — “He’s not gonna pass” — quietly escalated through Tuesday. Even close Trump allies voiced worries about Ingrassia, whose Thursday nomination hearing had already been punted in July because of antisemitism concerns.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a sometimes Trump critic who helms the committee vetting Ingrassia’s nomination, revealed the rising tensions in an interview with POLITICO Tuesday, hours before Ingrassia said he was stepping back. He vented over Trump’s handling of the nominee and urged fellow Republican senators to “man up” and bring their concerns about Ingrassia to the president. (He declined to say how he would vote.)
“What I say to the president, and to his administration — you need to read the messages,” Paul said. “And guess what? You need to make a decision on whether you want to send him forward.”
In Trump 2.0, Paul said he was “tired of being the only one that has any guts to stand up and tell the president the truth.”
“I hear a lot of flak from Republicans. They want me to do it,” he said. “They say, ‘Well, you’re not afraid of the president, you go tell him his nominee can’t make it.’ … I’m waiting to see a little courage.”
What else we’re watching:
— Bipartisan shutdown talks hit their limit: With the shutdown now in its fourth week, there are no signs the bipartisan conversations are anywhere close to generating an off-ramp. Senators don’t even agree whether the talks are still happening, let alone what it would take to break the stalemate.
What’s next? Thune is pointing to the end of this week as an inflection point for Republicans to decide if they need to extend the deadline on the House-passed Nov. 21 stopgap.
Dasha Burns and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.
