Former US President Donald Trump speaks about a train carrying hazardous waste during an event at a fire station in East Palestine, Ohio, February 22, 2023.
Alan Freed Reuters
Former president Donald Trump said Saturday that he will remain in the 2024 presidential race despite facing criminal charges in an ongoing investigation into the handling of White House documents and accused of tampering with the 2020 election.
Trump made that promise react Newsmax’s James Rosen, a former Fox News reporter, at a press conference at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, Rosen tweeted on Friday.
Trump launched his 2024 White House bid in November, a week after Republicans lost several key midterm races.
Recent polls of GOP voters show that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely considered Trump’s primary competition, would beat Trump if the two came to a close. DeSantis has not launched a bid for president.
Trump’s campaign comes amid a Justice Department investigation into whether he removed nearly 3,000 documents from the White House and potentially tainted the results of the 2020 election. The FBI seized nearly 200,000 pages of documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in September.
On Friday, Trump’s lawyers asked a federal court to block former vice president Mike Pence from speaking to a grand jury about his alleged attempt to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat, claiming executive privilege, several media reported.
The new filing was filed in a sealed proceeding on Friday, according to CNN. This isn’t the first time Trump’s legal team has asserted executive privilege to prevent Pence from testifying.
The investigation comes after Trump was indicted twice on high-profile felony and misdemeanor charges, once for allegedly using U.S. foreign aid to extort Ukraine and the second time for allegedly disrupting the January 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol.