Says Congress needs to address administration’s ethics

CLEVELAND — U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said on Sunday that Republican leaders in Congress need to address the ethics of Donald Trump’s presidential administration.

Appearing as a guest on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Brown was asked by host Chuck Todd about the firing of FBI deputy director Andy McCabe by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump celebrated McCabe’s firing on Twitter immediately after, declaring it “a great day for democracy” and had made him the target of Tweets in prior months.

Brown said his colleagues in the Senate have privately expressed disagreement with Trump.

“I hear so many Republican senators grumble about his ethics, about his name-calling,” Brown said. “I was with a CEO the other day who said he has never seen a business leader or a political leader who calls his employees or her employees names. And I think at some point Republican enablers in the House and Senate are going to say publicly what they’ve been saying privately. And that’s when things change and we see a president back off this kind of name-calling, not telling the truth, sending out these tweets, all that.”

Todd asked Brown, who is up for re-election this year, if the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia is something voters care about.

“I think that a lot of people do,” Brown said, adding that many wonder why the president does not criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same manner he does the other targets of his tweets and speeches.

“I think people, what they care about is they say a president who is engaging in that name-calling and they know people know he doesn’t tell the truth about a whole lot of things,” Brown said. “And I think people overwhelmingly wonder about President Trump when he calls everybody else names, including people in his own party, but he never, ever criticizes Putin. So, I would guess 70 to 80 percent of the people in Ohio, including Trump voters, really do wonder what exactly it is between Putin and Trump that we don’t know details about yet.”