Before Ken Paxton, There was Rick Scott: Trump’s Comfort with Criminals isn’t New

Florida Senator and Trump fan is a case study in what is wrong with the the GOP

Rick Scott is the senior United States senator from Florida and one of Donald Trump’s most reliable allies in Congress. He is also the former chief executive of Columbia/HCA, a hospital company that pleaded guilty to 14 federal felonies and paid roughly $1.7 billion in fines for what was, at the time, the largest healthcare fraud case in American history.

The company admitted, in open court, to operating as a criminal enterprise during the years Rick Scott ran it. Scott was never charged. He resigned in July 1997 with approximately $10 million in cash, $300 million in stock, and a consulting agreement. He has spent the twenty-eight years since insisting he did not know.

This is the man. This is the through-line. Everything else in his political career is downstream of that posture: he was in charge of the thing, and he did not know about the thing, and the proceeds are still his, and the accountability belongs to someone else. It is a defense Donald Trump would later refine to its logic…