“Back the Blue.” That once was a tried-and-true Republican sound bite.

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Today, it is news that Governor Asa Hutchinson is a lonely Republican politico urging support for law enforcement following the FBI service of a warrant at Donald Trump’s home in Florida to reclaim materials he improperly took from the White House. (If they were top secret documents, that enhances the crime, but the mere removal of any documents from the White House runs afoul of federal law, which puts those documents in control of the National Archives.)

In one of his many appearances on Sunday talk show as a presidential hopeful, Hutchinson said on CNN’s State of the Union that if the GOP is going to be the part support law enforcement, law enforcement includes the FBI. They do “extraordinarily heroic efforts to enforce our rule of law. He aded “We need to pull back on casting judgment on them.” He said it can’t be said FBI agents weren’t doing their job when they searched Trump’s home. But he did leave room for questions of the attorney general and others at the Justice Department. (Aren’t they law enforcement, too?) He credited the FBI with trying to “keep anarchy away from our country.”

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But Hutchinson still tried to thread the needle, talking about an unprecedented search of a former president His lying and removal of classified documents is also unprecedented, we might add. Hutchinson still calls for the release of the affidavit asking for the warrant. He’s a former U.S. attorney and knows this is also unprecedented because it would likely harm an ongoing criminal investigation.

The governor at least asked the question about why Trump had the documents in his home. Good question: Remember, even if he did “declassify” them by imaginary decree, he still wasn’t supposed to have them.

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UPDATE: With the transcript now posted, I see the former U.S. attorney is still leaning toward the Trump defense.

There’s a lot of facts, as Congressman Turner pointed out, that we do not have yet. And the biggest question is why and how. Why were those documents there? Why did the White House [the White House is no longer operative for Trump; he has no right to those documents] believe that they wanted them there, presumably, if that was the case? And so those facts have to be determined.

And so the American public is operating without sufficient information. I think we all have to take a deep breath and say we’re going to have to wait to see the facts that come out. There is some urgency in it, because this is unprecedented, the search of a former president’s home.

The American public wants to understand that. And, right now, you mentioned the circling of the wagons around Donald Trump. And it’s simply because they see the establishment is going after Donald Trump, and they question whether that was the right move and whether there was less intrusive means to accomplish the same purpose.

We’re going to have to be a little patient. The attorney general did the right thing by getting information out this week, some information. I actually encouraged him to release the affidavit in redacted form, but that would provide and shed more information on why this search might have been necessary and explain the probable cause that the judge saw whenever he signed the search warrant.

What a loser. There is no explanation, none, for Trump to be in possession that rightfully should be in the custody of the National Archives. To suggest there’s a good reason — never mind potentially treasonous possession of top secret stuff — is to contribute to the Big Lie machine.

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Hutchinsonn also defended Arkansas’s cruel, virtually-no-exceptions abortion ban. And he made it sounds as if the state was actually doing something significant for pre- and post-natal care with some scraps he tossed out last week. He volunteered no support for extending Medicaid coverage of new mothers for a year. He insisted he still didn’t want to go after a woman who obtained abortion pills on her own, but he said Arkansas would go after a provider. Which functionally produces the same outcome — punishment of a woman in the name of Hutchinson’s flavor of religion.

Among the Republicans defending Trump on the show was Rep. Mike Turner. He got raked over the coals. For example:

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