Legal dust-ups will not impede former President Donald Trump from embarking on a 2024 bid for the White House, he said Thursday.
Trump is confident that he will not get indicted despite mustering a deluge of inquiries from numerous prosecutors at the Justice Department as well as various state and local law enforcement offices.
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“I can’t imagine being indicted. I’ve done nothing wrong. Look, if you look, you know it better than anybody,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “Everything was declassified.”
Hewitt reminded Trump of the saying that “a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if they want to” and then echoed Trump’s sentiment that an indictment “would not take you out of the arena.”
“If a thing like that happened, I would have no prohibition against running,” Trump added. “It would not. But I think if it happened, I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.”
Criminal charges do not necessarily preclude running for the presidency, Business Insider reported. Hewitt also pressed Trump on what “problems” the country would endure if he was indicted.
“I think they’d have big problems, big problems. I just don’t think they’d stand for it. They will not, they will not sit still and stand for this ultimate of hoaxes,” the former president replied. “I don’t think the people of this country would stand for it, especially since they know, especially since they know I’m totally innocent.”
Trump then insisted he was merely explaining that an indictment would not sit well with many people. Hewitt noted that former Trump aide Kash Patel claimed he witnessed his old boss declassify “whole sets of documents” during his time as president.
Many legal experts and political foes of Trump have cast doubt on his assertion that he declassified documents at Mar-a-Lago, where FBI officials seized over 100 documents with classified markings during the Aug. 8 raid. Federal investigators noted in an affidavit for the raid that neither Trump nor his counsel informed them that the documents were declassified.
Cicilline: You can’t declassify something in secret retroactively only when you get caught with Top Secret documents stolen from The White House pic.twitter.com/f7IQhpBLZ6
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 14, 2022
Material seized ranged from “CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET information,” and DOJ officials are examining potential breaches of the Espionage Act and whether there was obstruction of justice, according to court documents.
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Trump previously said that his mind has already been made up about a 2024 foray and that the only lingering issue is when he would make an announcement.
In addition to the DOJ investigation about his handling of classified material, he has also been featured in lines of inquiry for the DOJ’s extensive inquiry of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He is also a key figure in the New York attorney general’s and Manhattan district attorney’s investigations into his business empire. Additionally, there is an investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, that is attempting to determine whether Trump or his associates acted illegally to influence the outcome of the 2020 election in the state.
