Without primary foe, Rubio rips FBI, IRS, gay marriage law

Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio called the search at former President Trump’s Florida resort a “disgrace” and akin to “a Marxist dictatorship” carried out by the FBI. He’s also said the thousands of additional IRS agents planned to be hired could be used as tools of “the left.”

Rubio also dismissed a proposed bill to codify gay marriage as “a waste of time.”

Rubio’s comments came despite not having any opponents in the GOP primary on Tuesday, which sometimes can prompt Republican incumbents to cover their right flanks.

Meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Rep. Demings, D-Orlando, his likely opponent in November, has been eagerly moving to the center by playing up her law enforcement past and distancing herself from comments favoring police reforms in 2020.

Gregory Koger, a professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Miami, said that one explanation for Rubio’s right turn is that Republicans expect midterm year turnout will be lower than in a presidential election year and it was more important to turn out the Trump base.

“There isn’t much point in running to the center if you think the center is going to stay home and watch,” Koger said.

But if there is a surge in voter turnout this year, due in part to the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and abortion rights, “the Rubio campaign is poorly situated to take advantage of [it],” he said.

Rubio was once one of Donald Trump’s biggest critics when running against him for president in 2016. For example, he said the nuclear codes couldn’t be trusted to “an erratic individual” like Trump, who called Rubio “Little Marco.”

Since then, though, he’s become one of the former president’s biggest defenders, appearing at rallies with him and voting against both of Trump’s impeachments and a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

“He may feel like he has a Trump problem, and that he needs to go out of his way to assure the Trump base in particular that he is one of them and that he shares their world view,” Koger said. “[But] if you’re going to be anti-crime as a Republican politician in 2022, I would assume that part of that should involve distancing yourself from the former president and current Florida resident.”

Rubio’s tweets since the Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago haven’t mentioned Trump’s name, but they have attacked the Justice Department for investigating him.

“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the [Justice Department] to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Rubio wrote in a tweet on Aug. 8. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around. And then we become Nicaragua under Ortega.”

Rubio also wrote, “Using government power to persecute political opponents is something we have seen many times from 3rd world Marxist dictatorships. But never before in America.”

He also criticized the FBI: “The FBI isn’t doing anything about the groups vandalizing Catholic Churches, firebombing Pro-Life groups or threatening Supreme Court justices. But they find time to raid Mar-a-Lago.”

On Aug. 10, Rubio wrote, “As predicted the far left & their media mouthpieces are laying the groundwork to criminalize opposition by arguing that anyone outraged by the FBI raid is ‘dangerous” & “fomenting violence.’”

The next day, an armed man attempted to enter the FBI office in Cincinnati and was later shot and killed by police. The man was a heavy user of Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, writing that the Mar-a-Lago search was a “call to arms” and “this time we must respond with force.”

That prompted Rubio to tweet that “anyone threatening violence over the Mar-A-Lago raid should be arrested, but where was the outrage & condemnation from the left & many in the media when the threats were against Supreme Court justices over the abortion ruling?”

That same day, reports showed that the warrant for the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago involved a possible violation of the Espionage Act. Agents also took classified documents from the estate after having been denied access for months, reports said.

Just minutes before that news broke, Rubio’s campaign sent out a fundraising email in which he asked, in capital letters, “HELP STOP THE RADICAL LEFT’S WITCH HUNT.”

“[I]t’s so important that we kick the Left out of power,” Rubio states in the email. “They have ruined our country and now they are abusing their power to stop political opponents. This is a disgrace. I need 100 patriots to step up right now to STOP the Left from abusing their power any longer.”

He also added, “After this raid on Mar-a-Lago, how do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents they just voted for? You could be next.”

The Biden administration said the IRS agents will be used for increased prosecution of large corporations and millionaires avoiding taxes, as well as to speed up filing and refunds. But many GOP politicians, including U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, have claimed they would be used against conservatives and falsely claimed they would all be “armed.”

The challenge Rubio faces, Koger said, is that “it’s a particularly confusing time to run against crime as a Republican politician.”

Several Republican lawmakers “are publicly calling for defunding the FBI,” Koger said. “And I haven’t seen him fight back. ... It seems like there’s some sort of crime that he doesn’t like. But he doesn’t know what it is, or what should be done about it.”

Asked why he was attacking law enforcement, or if he had any concerns about the potential crimes for which Trump was reportedly being investigated, Rubio campaign spokeswoman Elizabeth Gregory responded, “Rubio is conducting oversight and rightly calling out the politicization of the DOJ” in his role as vice chair of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The Demings campaign pointed to her comments on MSNBC on Aug. 11, in which Demings called Rubio’s rhetoric “dangerous.”

“He wasted no time, as all of America saw, throwing law enforcement under the bus,” Demings said. “To suggest that the top law enforcement agency, during an execution of a lawful, orderly, peaceful, well-coordinated search warrant, to liken that to a third world Marxist dictatorship, is just irresponsible. It’s disgraceful.”

Rubio’s rhetoric on Mar-a-Lago is not his only comments catering to the right to get national notice.

Rubio was asked by Business Insider last month about the planned vote to codify gay marriage into law following U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion that the court should “reconsider” the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage.

He called it “stupid waste of time,” adding, “That bill’s not important. It’s a waste of our time on a non issue. But I know plenty of gay people in Florida that are pissed off about gas prices.”

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