Donald Trump, the former president of the US, said on Thursday that the most recent charges against him are part of a larger effort to influence the 2024 election and that the indictment is “a persecution of a political opponent.”
“This is a very sad day for America,” Trump told reporters shortly after pleading not guilty in special counsel Jack Smith’s 2020 US Presidential election subversion case. “This is the persecution of the person that’s leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary and leading Biden by a lot. So if you can’t beat him you persecute him or you prosecute him,” Trump said while giving brief remarks on the tarmac at Washington Reagan National Airport before boarding his plane to return to New Jersey.
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Trump, who was standing in the rain while holding an umbrella, also criticized Washington, D.C., calling it a place of “filth and decay.”
Trump was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct an official investigation, and conspiracy against the right to vote and have one’s ballot counted when he was arraigned. Jack Smith, the special counsel who initiated the case against Trump, was seated in the front row of the hearing, roughly 10 feet away from the former president.
Trump is running for the Republican Party’s presidential candidacy in 2024, and he consistently holds a double-digit lead in polls of GOP primary voters.
According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Biden and Trump would have received 43 percent of the vote in a hypothetical rematch. This survey was taken from July 23 to July 27.
The former president is also accused of using a hush money plot to conceal an affair during the 2016 campaign in Manhattan and is charged with handling secret information after leaving office in Florida.
