GOP Candidates In Legal Trouble Borrow From Trump Playbook: Blame Obama!

[DonViejo]

By Cameron Joseph | April 30, 2018 6:00 am



When a top Republican candidate for governor was confronted over his family company’s illegally underpaying workers earlier this week, he responded with a familiar refrain in modern GOP politics: Thanks, Obama.

Adam Putnam, Florida’s agriculture commissioner and a top candidate for his party’s gubernatorial nomination in the key swing state, responded to questions about his family company’s failure to pay four workers minimum wage by blaming it on the previous president.

“After three days of Obama regulators crawling around our lower intestine, they came up with a $250 fine, which was later dismissed,” he told local reporters — even though that Department of Labor investigation into his family’s company, which forced them to pay $1,672 in back wages, began a year before Obama was even in office.

Putnam’s strategy of blaming a politicized government and sowing doubts about the integrity of federal officials is just the latest example of a Trump-era GOP candidate with legal problems attacking the former administration. That borrows from the president’s own playbook of attacking the intelligence community, the FBI and anyone else who’s investigating his team for possible wrongdoing as being politically motivated members of the “deep state” loyal to the former president, even if they’re career civil servants or Republicans.

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