“The whole world is laughing at the United States as they see how corrupt and horrible a place it has turned out to be under the leadership of Crooked Joe Biden,” former U.S. President Donald Trump told Fox News on Monday, August 14th, after a fourth set of criminal charges were brought against him.
Accusations arrived on Monday, when a grand jury in the state of Georgia issued an indictment denouncing the Republican politician’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. “Trump and the other defendants charged in this indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment said. Among the 19 defendants charged were Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
In January 2021, Trump urged Georgia’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” 11,780 votes—the number he would have required to beat Democratic nominee Joe Biden in that state. Raffensperger declined to do so. The recording of the phone call was later leaked to the press. According to Reuters, the indictment reaches across state lines, saying that Giuliani and Meadows called officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere seeking to change the outcome of the election in those states.
During an interview with Fox News, Donald Trump denied any wrongdoing, calling the indictment “politically-inspired” and “a continuation of the greatest and longest-running witch hunt in American history.” He added that the charges could have been brought years ago, but were “tailored for placement right smack in the middle of my political campaign, where I am leading all Republicans—by a lot—and beating Joe Biden soundly in almost all polls.”
According to the latest opinion polls, Trump is set to win the Republican primaries next year: he is favoured by almost 55% of Republican voters, with second-placed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis polling on a distant 13.5%. Trump’s numbers are running high despite previous indictments.
Trump is the first former president in United States history to face criminal charges, and this is the fourth indictment against him since he left office in January 2021. As the New York Post reports, in March, Trump was charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with 34 counts of business fraud for allegedly falsifying records to hide the reimbursement of hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. In June, Special Counsel for the Department of Justice (DOJ), Jack Smith hit Trump with more than three dozen counts of keeping classified national security information at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. Weeks later, Smith indicted Trump again on four federal counts in connection with his bid to remain in power following his defeat by Joe Biden. Trump pleaded not guilty in all three cases.
He faces a New York state trial—surrounding the hush money payment—beginning next March, and a Florida trial—the classified documents case—beginning in May, right in the middle of the primaries. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought the latest charges against Trump, said she would like a trial to take place within six months.
Republicans believe each of these cases are politically motivated, pointing to the fact that both Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg are elected Democrats, and Jack Smith is “the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOJ,” as Donald Trump put it. The Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz commented,
It is clear that this prosecutor went in with an objective to indict Donald Trump. It’s the same thing as Alvin Bragg, the wild George Soros partisan in New York. It’s the same thing as [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and Jack Smith.
Senator Cruz lambasted the latest criminal charges, calling them “nakedly political” and another attempt of election interference. Referring to the timing of the indictments, within the news cycle’s coverage of the suspicious business dealings of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, Cruz said:
Every time more bad news comes out about Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, you can set a stopwatch, within hours some clown goes in and indicts Donald Trump again.
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy also criticised the latest indictment, saying “Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election.”
Meanwhile, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, former legal counsel for Al Gore, also criticised the criminal charges, calling Trump’s actions “very similar” to that of Al Gore’s legal strategy after the 2000 presidential election. Democrat Al Gore challenged the election results after losing to George W. Bush.
“We challenged the election, and we did much of the things that are being done today and people praised us. Now they’re making it a crime,” Dershowitz said. “I was representing the voters of Palm Beach County, and we were saying ‘please check this county, check that county, find this vote, find those votes. We think there are more votes,’” Dershowitz described.
