WASHINGTON – A defiant Donald Trump and his Republican campaign challengers are starting a new phase of the 2024 presidential race in the shadow of a familiar issue: Trump indictments.
Trump and rivals speak at a high-profile Iowa Republican dinner on Friday night, a day after his attorneys met with prosecutors about an investigation into 2020 election fraud – and also a day after another grand jury leveled more charges in an obstruction of justice case concerning classified documents.
Trump, who said early Friday he is willing to campaign from prison if necessary, has denounced the indictments as politically motivated efforts to defeat him in 2024. He is expected to ratchet up his attacks at prosecutors at Iowa’s Lincoln Day Dinner on Friday and a Saturday rally in Erie, Pa.
“What they are doing is absolutely horrible,” Trump told radio host John Fredericks on Friday.
In a plea to donors just after noon Friday, Trump warned of a “time table set for plot against us,” setting the stage for how he will talk about his legal challenges in Iowa Friday and Erie, Pa., on Saturday.
“As of the moment I’m writing you this email, I am waiting to hear if I will be INDICTED and ARRESTED for a crime I did not commit!” he said in the campaign fundraising email.
He also decried recent calls from Sen. Mitt Romney and other Republican senators, who he described as Republicans in Name Only, to coalesce donor money around one Trump challenger and avoid giving him the benefit of a crowded field.
“They have exposed themselves to be VULTURES circling the skies, waiting and hoping to use our injustice and misfortune for their own personal gain,” Trump said in the email.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and most other Republican candidates have said relatively little about Trump’s legal problems, and many sustain that posture even as the allegations mount against the former president.
“I think voters have to make this decision on that,” DeSantis told CBS News.
‘Trump failed us’
Trump’s most outspoken critic, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, won’t be at the Iowa dinner. He will be campaigning this weekend and denouncing Trump’s conduct with classified documents and efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
“Trump failed us,” Christie tweeted Friday.
‘Stretching’ the law to get Trump
DeSantis, who is running an increasingly distant second to Trump in many polls, has questioned Trump’s conduct over items like hush money, the source of the charges against Trump in New York. He has also said prosecutors in all of these cases are trying to stretch laws beyond the breaking point to get Trump.
Asked this week about the 2020 election case, DeSantis told Fox News: “I think what they’re doing in this is they are taking some of these old statutes from, like, Reconstruction era – violation of rights, or conspiracy of rights – and they’re stretching it to try to fit this conduct.”
Pence and Ramaswamy
Most of the other candidates speaking at the Lincoln Day Dinner in Iowa have been similarly reticent.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who actually testified before the grand jury about Trump’s pressure on him to invalidate the electoral votes that elected Biden, has also criticized the potential prosecution over this matter.
“I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told CNN. “But while his words were reckless, I – based on what I know – I’m not yet convinced that they were criminal.”
Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who is moving up in some polls, said he would have acted differently during the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. But he added that Trump’s judgement is not a crime and he should not be held legally responsible for the violence and mayhem of that day.
“I would have handled it very differently,” Ramaswamy told USA TODAY. “But that’s a different statement from saying that he was responsible for it.”
Haley’s ‘drama’
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has said little about the details of the indictments. She has said that the entire series of legal issues – including civil lawsuits – will unnecessarily dominate the campaign and undermine the Republican message about Biden’s presidency.
In a mid-month interview on Fox News, Haley said the primary season is “gonna be about lawsuits, it’s gonna be about legal fees, it’s gonna be about judges, and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction.”
She added: “We can’t keep dealing with this drama … We can’t keep dealing with the negativity. “
Scott and Christie
Reactions to Trump’s legal troubles are dividing some of his challengers.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who has criticized the investigation, told WMUR television in New Hampshire that he didn’t hold Trump responsible for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. “I can only hold responsible the very people who threatened my life and the former president did not threaten my life,” Scott said.
That drew a rebuke from Christie, who told CBS he was “disappointed” in Scott, and argued that Trump was responsible for the mayhem of Jan. 6: “The president invited them. The president lied to them and told them the election was stolen.”
Trump’s trial schedule
Trump and his challengers will have many opportunities to comment on his legal travails.
The former president’s legal agenda has many items:
- Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith notified Trump he’s a target in the investigation of election fraud in the 2020 election. Trump’s lawyers met with Smith’s team Thursday and an indictment could come any day.
- New York Attorney General Letitia James has a $250 million civil trial scheduled to start Oct. 2 against Trump’s namesake company on allegations of fraud for lying for a decade about the value of properties.
- E. Jean Carroll won a $5 million defamation case against Trump, which he is appealing. She has another trial scheduled to begin in New York on Jan. 15 – the day of Iowa Republican presidential caucuses.
- New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg has a criminal trial scheduled to start March 25 on 34 charges of falsifying business records to pay hush money before the 2016 election to a woman who claimed to have had sex with him.
- Smith has a federal trial tentatively scheduled to start May 20 in Florida on charges related to classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate a year and a half after leaving the White House. Trump faces 40 charges including conspiracy to obstruct justice, retaining national defense records and concealing the records from authorities.
Hutchinson and Hurd
Long-shot Republican candidates who are speaking in Iowa have said the allegations should disqualify Trump from the GOP presidential nomination.
Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has long said Trump should exit the race, for which he has been mocked by the former president.
Former Rep. Will Hurd, R-Tex., told CNN that the new charges in the documents case underscore why Trump is unfit. He joked that he is not a lawyer, “but if you are deleting evidence it is because you know you are committing a crime … Donald Trump is running for president in order for him to stay out of jail.”
