Morning Joe Invokes William F. Buckley To Attack ‘Pathetic Hacks’ And ‘Trump Enablers’

Joe Scarborough continued his attacks on President Donald Trump’s public defender Friday morning. The Morning Joe host has been strongly criticizing Attorney General William Barr all week. Today, he took aim at those praising Barr and drew an interesting comparison.

Following footage of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi saying Barr lied to Congress, Scarborough made stinging remarks and framed them in a conservative way – a method he’s used in the past to criticize the current crop of pro-Trump Republicans.

“So, Mike [Barnicle], I love that Nancy Pelosi just told the truth right there, didn’t say, well, we’ve had some people, well, you know — she said he lied. He did lie. He lied to Congress. We’ve got at least one solid example of it that any of us would be thrown in jail for perjury. We’d all be in jail.”

“He may have lied to Chris Van Hollen. Just depends how to grand jury would look at that but we would still at least be sent to a grand jury for saying what he said to Chris Van Hollen. On the matter of the utmost public importance, the undermining of the Justice Department’s purpose for selecting a special counsel, in the words of Robert Mueller himself.”

“So he has committed perjury. And I personally believe they should start looking into impeachment — an impeachment inquiry if the rule of law means anything at all. But I’m watching these pathetic hacks on the right, some of whom used to have respectable careers, they’ve turned themselves into nothing more than Trump enablers, talking about how what Barr did was correct.”

“You look at him lying before Congress and match up what these pathetic hacks are saying about Barr’s lying and what they said about Bill Clinton’s lying in 1998 and 1999 and suddenly they’re sounding an awful lot like the man who said, it depends on what your meaning of ‘is’ is. They are engaging in legalistic semantic games, the likes of which William F. Buckley attacked Bill Clinton supporters for doing in 1998.”

Buckley, founder of the National Review, remains a conservative icon in an increasingly changing right-wing landscape. Scarborough was a Republican congressman while Buckley was still a prominent conservative thinker. Though Buckley’s reputation has suffered with re-appraisal since his death, especially on issues relating to race, invoking him can be an effective line of attack against Trump conservatives.

Scarborough also brought up the Bill Clinton comparison once again, another method he’s deployed to point out Republican hypocrisy.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.