Jim Jordan’s latest grandstanding just put a spotlight on his own scandalous past – and what’s coming out is UGLY
House Republican Jim Jordan loves nothing more than abusing his position in Congress to aggressively take the morally wrong side of every political issue that comes along. That’s not surprising, given his own past of having allegedly helped cover up a sexual abuse scandal on the Ohio State University wrestling team.
The trouble for Jordan is that he’s now wading into entirely new territory by trying to actively interfere in a District Attorney’s criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. When you have a past full of ugly secrets, and you start pulling this kind of thing, people from your past suddenly become more inclined to come forward. And that appears to now be happening to Jordan in his wrestling scandal.
On Sunday night the New York Times published an expose revealing just how far Jim Jordan went to not only cover up the Ohio State wrestling scandal, but then cover up the fact that he covered it up. When one wrestler threatened to come forward about Jordan, the Times says that Jordan responded by “calling a wrestler’s aging parents and asking them to persuade their son to back off the charge that Mr. Jordan knew about the abuse and did nothing.”
Jim Jordan’s Ohio State wrestling scandal has been around forever. Everyone knows about it. It’s always just sort of been there. Jordan is in such a far right extremist district (he just won reelection by nearly 40 points) that his constituents aren’t going to replace him with a Democrat no matter what. And since the crux of the scandal was always that Jordan merely helped keep it quiet but wasn’t one of the abusers, it never felt like it was really going to take him down – no matter how much it should have.
But now this is something a bit different. Jordan didn’t just ignore what he knew about the abuse scandal. He ultimately went after elderly parents in an effort to bully witnesses out of coming forward to reveal that he’d ignored the abuse scandal. And you just know there have to be even uglier details still hidden, which are more likely to get spilled as Jordan pushes forward with trying to meddle in a New York criminal case where he has no jurisdiction.
How much more will now come out about Jim Jordan’s time at Ohio State? At what point will it cross over from merely despicable behavior into actual criminal behavior? Does this all end with Jordan ultimately criminally charged in some way? And how much more aggressively and stupidly will Jordan keep forcing the issue in the name of defending Donald Trump, a guy who’s going to prison anyway?
