Donald Trump facing more legal woes after federal charges in 2020 election probe
- His rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination take different tacks in addressing the four-count federal indictment
- Attention shifts to Georgia, where a district attorney investigating 2020 election interference has said she will announce any charging decision this month
Trump is expected to face another criminal indictment in Georgia that alleges similar activity in the southeastern state.
The district attorney handling that case has said she will announce any charging decision by September 1.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, polling a distant second behind Trump for the Republican nomination in next year’s presidential election, said on social media that he believed the indictment handed up on Tuesday was further evidence of the need for “reform” of America’s justice system.
“As President, I will end the weaponisation of government, replace the FBI Director, and ensure a single standard of justice for all Americans,” DeSantis wrote.
“While I’ve seen reports, I have not read the indictment. I do, though, believe we need to enact reforms so that Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, DC to their home districts.”
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US former president Donald Trump indicted on 4 charges in his role to overturn 2020 election results
Mike Pence, who served as Trump’s vice-president, issued a statement calling the indictment “an important reminder” and added: “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”
Tuesday’s indictment included details of Trump’s attempts to pressure Pence to refrain from certifying the election, and quoted Trump as telling Pence that he was “too honest”.
Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s UN ambassador, did not issue a statement about the latest indictment, but said in an interview on Sunday that if accusations made in a superseding indictment last week in a separate case involving Trump’s retention of classified documents were true, “it’s incredibly dangerous to our national security”.
Signalling some mistrust in the legal proceedings against Trump, however, Haley vowed that if she were to become president, she would “clean it up from the top”.
In the latest poll of likely Republican voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College late last month, Trump got 54 per cent; DeSantis got 17 per cent, a significant decline from earlier this year; and Pence and Haley both came in at 3 per cent.
Looking at a 2024 rematch between Trump and US President Joe Biden, the poll put the two even, each with 43 per cent support.
Even as Washington prepares for Trump’s arraignment on Thursday, attention now turns to Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has finished her criminal investigation into Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn the results of her state’s election in 2020.
Paul Schiff Berman, a law professor at George Washington University, said that the Georgia case could become even more problematic for Trump.
Trump could be indicted soon in Georgia. Here’s a look at that investigation
“The case is similarly focused on this large-scale scheme of a sitting president to overthrow the government that he was supposed to be a part of, and undo the democratic transition of power, which has been a hallmark of American democracy for since its founding,” Berman said.
“The other important point is that the would-be indictment [in Georgia] is a state prosecution, which means that even if Trump became president and tried to pardon himself or direct the Justice Department to drop all federal charges, it would not impact these charges in Georgia,” he noted.
Security barriers have been erected outside the Fulton County courthouse to prepare for the possibility that Trump supporters will clash with law enforcement officials, according to local media reports. The local sheriff’s office has sent teams to Miami and New York to learn the security protocols for Trump’s two previous arraignments this year, according to CNN.
Trump is also stuck in other legal actions.
In May, a civil court jury in New York found Trump liable for sexually abusing magazine writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defaming her by branding her a liar; it ordered him to pay US$5 million in damages.
