As former President Donald Trump is preparing to be indicted by the Democrat District Attorney of Manhattan Alvin Bragg, some of his critics are slamming the indictment as partisan politics.
Andrew McCarthy, former chief assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has never been a fan of Trump’s, over the weekend blasted Bragg’s case against the former president as “nonsense” and a “blatantly partisan exercise of raw power.”
“This is a classic, invidious selective prosecution. It is being launched strictly for political purposes,” he wrote in a column for the National Review Online.
“It is hard to think of anything that will more rile up Trump’s base and anger other Republicans who, regardless of their distaste for Trump, will find this maneuver despicable,” he argued.
Trump said on social media over the weekend that he believes he will be indicted this week by Bragg.
Alan Dershowitz, who is also not a fan of Trump’s but has slammed politicized investigations and impeachments of the former president, wrote recently in the New York Sun:
All decent people, whether politically opposed to Mr. Trump (as I am) or supportive of his candidacy, should be concerned about this weaponizing of the prosecutor’s office for the political purpose of preventing a potential candidate from running for office.
Even some of the president’s potential 2024 rivals are calling the potential indictment political persecution.
Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s vice president but has distanced himself from the former president since January 6, 2021, said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, “It reeks of the kind of political prosecution that that we endured back in the days of the Russia hoax and the whole impeachment over a phone call.”
He also slammed a seeming system of two-tiered justice, saying that there seems to be “one standard for Republicans — particularly anybody ever associated with the Trump-Pence administration — and others.”
Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), a potential 2024 contender, said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that he was having coffee earlier that morning with some folks — “none of them were big Trump supporters” — who “all said, you know, they felt like he was being attacked.”
Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the actual declared 2024 candidates, also criticized the pending indictment.
“A Trump indictment would be a national disaster. It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals,” Ramaswamy wrote in a tweet.
A Trump indictment would be a national disaster. It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals. If a Republican prosecutor in 2004 had used a campaign finance technicality to arrest then-candidate John Kerry while Bush & Cheney were in… https://t.co/vRIDRLRuha
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 18, 2023
Florida governor Ron DeSantis, seen as the top 2024 rival to Trump, finally weighed in on Monday, slamming Bragg as another one of the “Soros-funded” prosecutors who “weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety.”
Watch: Ron DeSantis Breaks Silence on Rumored Trump Indictment
Ron DeSantis / Rumble
Some of Trump’s critics argued that an indictment would actually help him.
Former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), another Trump critic, said an indictment would rally sympathy to Trump in the short term. “He only profits and does well in chaos and turmoil,” he said Sunday on ABC News’s This Week.
Andrew McCarthy, the former U.S. attorney, argued that the indictment was part of a Democrat scheme to rally Republicans behind Trump so that he would win the Republican primary and fall to the Democrat candidate.
“Such an indictment materially increases the chance that Republicans will nominate Trump — exactly the outcome that Democrats and the media crave,” he said.
Elon Musk, Twitter and Tesla CEO who voted for Biden in 2020 and has been critical of Trump, said he believed an indictment would actually lead to his being re-elected.
He tweeted that if the former president is indicted, “Trump will be re-elected in a landslide.”
If this happens, Trump will be re-elected in a landslide victory
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2023
Legal experts expect Bragg to bring charges of falsifying business records against Trump, which is a misdemeanor but can be upgraded to a felony if it was done to hide another crime. Legal experts expect the other “crime” to be alleged campaign finance violations.
They expect Bragg to argue that the Trump Organization falsified business records when it paid then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen $130,000 and classified it as legal expenses, when it was allegedly to reimburse Cohen for a payment he made to porn actress Stormy Daniels as “hush money” before Trump launched his 2016 campaign.
Bragg is expected to argue that the payment was actually a campaign expense and Trump’s campaign violated campaign finance regulations by not characterizing it as such. However, the Federal Election Commission itself declined to penalize Trump over the issue, and federal prosecutors have also declined to do so.
Related Video — Trump Lawyer Tacopina: Indictment Would Be ‘Weaponizing the Justice System’ to Take Vote Out of the Voters’ Hands
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