Former President Donald Trump on Saturday said that "in a sick way" he enjoys the legal charges and investigations brought against him because they "expose" the motivations of his political opponents.
Speaking at the North Carolina Republican Party's convention in Greensboro, Trump addressed the newly unsealed federal indictment accusing him of mishandling classified documents, as well as the various investigations targeting him since he was elected president in 2016.
"They launched witch hunt after witch hunt, and they just try to stop our movement," said Trump. "They want to do anything they can to thwart the will of the American people. It's called election interference. That's what they're doing now. And we've never seen it on a scale like this. The other side is downright crooked."
Trump, who said Trump said he has "5,000 prosecutors" going after him, was indicted Friday on 37 federal counts, including willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and false statements.
Trump also referenced the impeachment proceedings launched against him as well as the findings of Special Counsel John Durham, who last month released a final report on his investigation into the original probe concerning whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Durham found that there was never any information to justify opening the FBI's investigation and that the bureau and the Department of Justice "failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law."
"We beat it all off, didn't we?" Trump said. "They put our country through hell, and they knew it was a lie the entire time."
The former president then suggested that any Republican who becomes president will be the subject of similar investigations and on the receiving end of unending political attacks, arguing that anyone but him will crumble under such pressure.
"That person will not be able to withstand the fire," he said. "And they actually admit it. They come to me: 'How do you stand this?' And I usually look at them and say, 'In a sick way I sort of enjoy it, because it exposes them.' It exposes them for what they are. And it's also lifted the poll numbers to even higher legs."
Trump touted poll numbers showing him comfortably ahead as the front-runner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Trump also directed his ire at President Joe Biden, calling him "corrupt."
Earlier in the day, Trump delivered his first public remarks since being indicted, accusing Democrats of a "political hit job" against him and alleging a double standard in the Biden administration of justice.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW: A “DARK DAY” for the U.S.
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Trump Savagely Destroys Biden In First Appearance Since Indictment News
By Sarah Arnold | Townhall.com
AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Former President Trump savagely criticizes the Biden Administration for unfairly attacking him regarding classified documents being found in his possession. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden was found guilty of the same thing.
“They took one charge, and they made it 36 different times. And we have a thug who is in charge. This is a political hit job; Republicans are treated far differently at the Justice Department than Democrats," Trump said during his speech at the Georgia Republican state convention.
Trump accused Democrats of a “political hit job” as the 2024 Republican front-runner appears to garner mass support from American voters.
“We now have two standards of justice in this country,” Trump continued, accusing the Left of a double standard. “The Democrat communists want to jail their opponents while they protect the murderers who prowl our cities day and night and other brazen criminals.”
The 45th President called the second indictment against him a “joke,” suggesting the Democrat’s political witch hunt would backfire.
“They launched one hoax and witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement,” Trump said. “As far as the joke of an indictment, it's a horrible thing. Such a horrible thing for this country. I mean, the only good thing about it is it's driven my poll numbers way up. Can you believe it? It's driven up, way up, and somebody said the fundraising is through the roof.”
Trump’s comments mark his first public appearance since the 37-count federal indictment was unsealed on Friday. The former President has denied any wrongdoing and claims he had declassified the materials before taking them from the White House.
“All of my documents fell under what is known as the Presidential Records Act, which is not at all a criminal act,” Trump said. “And this fake indictment, they don't even once mention the Presidential Records Act, which is really the ruling — which is the case it falls under because they want something called the Espionage Act, which sounds terrible.”
Trump hit back at the Biden Administration’s weaponized Department of Justice, saying that his indictment will go down in history as one of the most horrific abuses of power.
“This vicious persecution is a travesty of justice,” Trump said, adding that the upcoming presidential election is no longer between Republicans and Democrats but between the “deep state" and democracy.
“Either we have a deep state, or we have a democracy. We're going to have one or the other. And we're right at the tipping point," he said. “And either they win, or we win. It's very simple. They win, or we win.”
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Trump Makes First Speech Since Indictment, Attacks 'Corrupt DOJ's Double Standards'
Trump makes first public appearance since his federal indictment. Screenshot credit: Fox5 Atlanta
Saturday afternoon former President Donald Trump made his first speech since announcing on Truth Social that he had been indicted by a federal grand jury on criminal charges relating to his alleged mishandling of classified White House documents. The indictment, which was unsealed Friday, contains 37 felony counts, including willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding documents, corruptly concealing records, concealing documents in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal, and making false statements.
Trump, accompanied by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), spoke at the Georgia Republican Party convention. He was fired up, as one might expect, calling the indictment “election interference” and “a political hit job.” Referring to the indictment as “ridiculous” and “baseless,” Trump said:
The ridiculous and baseless indictment by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country.
[..]
They’ve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people. … In the end, they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you.
Numerous legal experts weighed in after reading the indictment, including Jonathan Turley, Andrew McCarthy, Alan Dershowitz, and Mike Davis. While there were differences of opinion as to whether or not the Espionage Act applies and the role of declassification, legal experts on the conservative side of the aisle have all agreed that they believe the prosecution is politically motivated.
“Republicans are treated much differently at the Justice Department than Democrats,” Trump said, which is perhaps the understatement of the decade, given the multiple relentless attacks he’s endured from everyone from Nancy Pelosi to James Comey to Merrick Garland and the Justice Department.
To that point, Trump told the rally:
“Every time I fly over a blue state I get a subpoena. The only good thing about it is that it’s driven my poll numbers way up. Can you believe it?
“This vicious persecution is a travesty of justice. You’re watching Joe Biden [try] to jail his leading political opponent – an opponent that is beating him by a lot in the polls – just like they do in Stalinist Russia, or communist China. No different.
“Our country has gone very bad…Just think of it – in three years.
“Together we will stand up to globalists, the Marxists’ as well as ‘the communists, environmental extremists, the open border fanatics the radical left, the prosecutors and the fake news media.
“Our country has tears because of what’s happening. We have fake elections, we have no borders, we have inflation, we have – everything is just going wrong.
“We now have two standards of justice in our country. The Democrat Communists who jail their opponents while they protect the murderers who prowl our cities day and night, and other brazen criminals.
“To thunderous applause, Trump added, “No criminal is more protected than crooked Joe Biden.”
The Bottom Line
There is no bottom line, yet. Not one that matters, anyway.
While Trump’s case will play out the way it plays out — regardless of the opinions, considered or not from outside a Miami courtroom, the various House GOP investigations into Joe Biden and the Biden Family business will play out, as well.
With the 2024 presidential election 17 months away, If we’ve learned anything over the last several years, it’s that damn near anything can happen.
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Former AG William Barr is simply wrong about the Presidential Records Act
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Justice is hardly blind in the federal case going against Donald Trump
By Michael Goodwin | New York Post
Based on a grand jury search warrant, federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago and the evidence they gathered was bolstered with FBI interviews of Trump aides, employees and even his lawyers.
Weaving in seized texts and emails from key moments, prosecutors have created a compelling picture of their case, with Trump’s personality and habits of deception coming through loud and clear in the 49-page charging document.
However, I believe that if federal prosecutors had empaneled a grand jury and obtained a search warrant for Joe Biden’s properties and if FBI agents had put his aides, employees and lawyers under oath, scoured their phones and emails and confronted them with evidence to get them to talk, agents would have found that Biden knowingly kept classified documents for many years in his homes and offices, including in the four years between his being vice president and president.
Honest agents unencumbered by any political bias of their own or their bosses’ might also have discovered that Hunter Biden and other family members and associates had access to the supposedly secret documents and possibly used them in drawing up their lucrative business schemes with foreign officials and businesses.
Instead, a special counsel assigned to the case appears to be about as vigorous as Joe.
I also believe that had the Department of Justice empaneled a grand jury and executed a search warrant on Hillary Clinton’s home and offices in 2013 or 2014 and seized her private computer server, phones and electronic devices, along with the devices of her aides and interviewed her lawyers under oath, FBI agents would have found many thousands of unsecured critical documents that were still in her possession long after she left the Department of State.
As it was, more than 2,000 documents deemed to be classified, top secret or confidential were recovered from her devices in 2015 and 2016, despite the fact that Clinton deleted some 33,000 emails she claimed were not work-related.
Although the FBI oddly accepted her claim, then-Director James Comey said Clinton was wrong to use a private server and there was evidence she and aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
“None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system,” Comey said before suddenly changing course and adding: “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Comey was out of line in publicly recommending against prosecution, but got away with it — and so did Clinton.
It probably didn’t hurt either one that Attorney General Loretta Lynch worked in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton and that Bill and Loretta just happened to meet during the probe in an Arizona airport and have a private conversation about, you know, golf and grandkids.
Tale of three candidates
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
For my money, that neatly sums up the challenge presented by the Trump indictment.
While his case will ultimately rise or fall on its merits, it is indisputable that Trump is being treated far more harshly than either Biden or Clinton were under very similar circumstances.
All three kept classified documents where and when they shouldn’t have.
Only one is being prosecuted.
All three ran for president, but only one had his campaign spied on by the FBI, an action later found to be unwarranted.
And only one was the victim of nonstop FBI leaks to the media alleging collusion with a foreign power that helped undermine his presidency, even though many of the leaks were found to be misinformation.
Does it matter that the one person subjected to these extreme measures by the government and media is a Republican, while the other two are Democrats?
Only a fool or a liar would deny the obvious.
Trump haters, some of whom call themselves journalists, justify that sordid history of misconduct against him by calling him every vile epithet under the sun.
He had it coming, they say, and believe he had no right ever to be president.
There is no concern of the unprecedented nature of the charges, only jubilation that he is the first former president in American history to be charged with federal crimes.
Many fantasize he will die in prison.
Bias just like old Times
The New York Times, which never fails to reveal its agenda, moaned that the Miami judge assigned to the case was appointed by Trump and “has shown him favor.”
The assumption seems to be that a Biden appointee would be more fair.
Really?
One does not have to think Trump is an angel, or even innocent in the current case, to believe there is something very rotten in Washington.
Two standards of justice, open and notorious, are doing more harm to American democracy than Trump could do in two lifetimes.
The decline of trust in government, including the once-hallowed FBI, mostly reflects actions taken by Democrats in recent years to gain or keep power.
As special prosecutor John Durham recently concluded, there was no justification for the FBI to open a case against Trump’s 2016 campaign, even as it inexplicably delayed or ignored potential avenues of investigation against Clinton’s family foundation.
And don’t forget that the phony Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, helped fuel the FBI’s zeal to nail Trump.
Think what that means: The Justice Department, with the knowledge of the Democratic White House, meddled in a presidential election with the aim of electing the Democrat and defeating — and perhaps prosecuting — the Republican.
And here we go again.
The federal case against Trump now, even if it meets the standard of the law, cannot be divorced from the recent history of election meddling, given that he is the leading GOP candidate against Biden.
In five years, perhaps a future Durham will look back on these events and write another report chronicling how the party in power again weaponized law enforcement to control an election.
In a brief statement defending the 37 charges against Trump, special counsel Jack Smith insisted there was nothing unusual about the case, saying, “We have one set of laws in this country and they apply to everybody.”
Please, save it for civics class.
In reality, Biden appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed Smith.
Whether he likes it or not, the buck stops on Biden’s desk, especially because Biden let it be known more than a year ago he wanted Trump prosecuted.
Does anyone really believe it’s just a coincidence that Smith, under Garland’s guidance, has delivered what the boss wanted?
Meanwhile, Biden has a lot of dirty laundry himself, but Garland is protecting him.
Consider the evidence.
The Hunter Biden probe, now in its fifth year, reeks of favoritism, a charge leveled against it by IRS and FBI whistleblowers.
The evidence of various crimes has been public for years, and Joe’s connection is provable.
Nearly three years ago, he was identified as the “big guy” scheduled to get a secret 10% cut in a multimillion-dollar family deal with Chinese communists.
Those charges, based on The Post’s stories about the contents of Hunter’s abandoned laptop, were censored by Big Tech at the direction of the FBI.
The Ukraine $torm
Then there’s the newest dimension to Joe’s likely misconduct — the discovery that the FBI has been sitting on a charge since 2017, and renewed at least twice since by an informant, that he accepted a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian businessman.
Reports say Hunter also got $5 million in the same deal, and there are suggestions the money came from the head of Burisma, the corrupt energy company that hired Hunter for its board of directors and paid him millions while Joe was Obama’s point man for Ukraine.
Where’s the grand jury on that case?
Where are the subpoenas for Biden’s bank records and a house raid searching for evidence?
Where is the media firestorm?
Nowhere, that’s where, because Garland and the FBI have been sitting on the Biden bribe allegation without either confirming it or dismissing it.
We know the allegation exists only because a tipster told congressional Republicans, who demanded to see the FBI report of the informant’s story.
The possibility of Joe Biden’s guilt has many implications, including the specter that Congress impeached the wrong man in 2019.
House Democrats impeached Trump over a phone call with the president of Ukraine, in which Trump asked for help investigating whether the Bidens engaged in corrupt actions there when Joe was vice president.
It was an unfair, purely partisan impeachment under any circumstances, but even more so if Biden really was guilty of corruption.
Had that been discovered then, Trump would have been re-elected and Biden would be the one facing criminal charges.
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Democrats Had Better Be Careful What They Wish for After the Latest Trump Indictment
AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall
Regardless of what you think about the Trump indictment, it’s hard not to believe that it smacks of the Democrats’ endless attempts to nail Donald Trump for — something. We’ve gotten used to it over the past few years, and these legal maneuvers always seem to play out the same way.
“We’re all familiar with the ‘Trump facing…’ news loop by now,” writes Freddy Gray at The Spectator. “America is stuck in Trump legal groundhog day — he’s remorselessly prosecuted, over and over, on so many fronts. He always responds the same way, protesting his INNOCENCE in capital letters on Truth Social, saying he can’t believe this is happening in America. Then his team fires out fundraising emails.”
Maybe they have him this time, but maybe not. After all, we’ve heard the rhetoric about the “walls closing in” on Trump for a long time now.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO: "The Walls Are Closing In on Trump"
What seems to be missing from the Democrats’ calculus in indicting Trump again (with potentially more indictments to follow) is that the whole scheme could backfire on them tremendously. They don’t seem to be aware of the precedent they’re setting with these indictments.
The Democrats are clearly counting on being able to knock Trump out of the 2024 election cycle, but they apparently haven’t given much thought to the idea that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Revenge against the Democrats is always on the table, and it could come in the form of a second Trump term or another Republican president who is happy to give the Biden crime family the same treatment.
Hell hath no fury like Donald Trump scorned, and don’t we all know that Trump 2.0 would become a four-year revenge tour? The Oval Office would become the world headquarters of vengeance.
“Should Trump return to office, expect him to embark on a four-year race for vengeance in hunting down his enemies,” Ben Domenech points out at Spectator World. “And given that he won’t be able to run for re-election, there will be no brakes.”
PJ Media’s own Robert Spencer wrote earlier this week about former FBI director James Comey suggesting that Democrats “think about what four years of a retribution presidency might look like. He could order the investigation and prosecution of individuals who he sees as enemies — I’m sure I’m on the enemies list — because the president constitutionally does oversee the Executive Branch entirely, which includes the Department of Justice, prosecutors, and investigators. And so he could commission, direct, that individuals be pursued.”
The possibilities certainly are endless, but it doesn’t have to be Trump enacting the revenge. It’s not hard to imagine another Republican president turning the tables on the Democrats, not necessarily to avenge Trump but to make the Democrats pay for weaponizing the federal government. It would serve the Democrats right, even if it’s a bad precedent to set.
“We do not want to become the kind of nation where part of the job of being commander-in-chief is understanding that at the end of your time in office, you will be sued to the nth degree at every opportunity by your political enemies in any jurisdiction,” Domenech writes. “That invites ruthless people willing to bear such attacks in pursuit of raw power, the same people likely to deploy them against others.”
He’s not wrong. Politics is ugly enough as it is, and to bring the constant p***ing contest of one-upmanship and revenge for the last administration into the mix would be even more unbearable. Still, the Democrats have it coming for their ruthless and relentless pursuit of trying to nail Donald Trump for some crime.
