Republican senator suggests Biden using Mar-a-Lago raid to distract from falling gas prices

Ernst’s talking points come as prices have dropped for weeks

A Republican senator, joining the ranks of her colleagues in spinning their party’s defence of Donald Trump after the FBI’s seizure of allegedly classified materials from Mar-a-Lago, made a particularly odd claim about Joe Biden during a recent news appearance.

Joni Ernst of Iowa joined Fox News on Monday to discuss the raid and suggested that the president was somehow “using” coverage of the apparent criminal investigation of the former president to distract from issues including high gas prices, inflation and other “crises”.

“The timing of this, when we have 40-year-high inflation, when we have the highest gas prices that Americans have seen during this administration...they need a little bit of a distraction,” she claimed.

The suggestion was bizarre, however, as gas prices have been dropping at an incredible pace across the country for weeks, and are now down more than a dollar per gallon from their peak. OPEC has recently lowered its forecast for global oil demand for the rest of year year, meaning that, barring a major disruption of oil production, the environment is right for gas prices to continue dropping.

Inflation, too, while still a problem globally, appeared dip slightly in the US this month while Democrats in Washington passed a piece of legislation intended to fight inflation (though its actual effects are not yet clear).

Ms Ernst made a number of factually incorrect claims in the short interview clip that went unchallenged by the interviewer; gas prices are not currently at a historic high, or even the highest they’ve been during the Biden administration. She also claimed that such “crises” like high gas prices and inflation were “manufactured” by the Biden White House, when in reality they are global issues that are affecting key US allies, too. The UK, for example, is dealing with surging inflation on a much higher scale than the US and is on course to see prices rise by 18 per cent next year, driven primarily by high gas prices.

Republicans have launched a wide range of increasingly desperate attacks against the Biden administration, the FBI and the Justice Department as whole following the execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

Undermining the party’s defences are a number of increasingly high-ranking GOP ex-officials who have outright stated that Trump’s team is lying and did not legally have the right to store classified documents in such a manner at Mar-a-Lago.