NEW YORK (AP) — Legally speaking, the most important words former President Donald Trump said after being indicted on 34 felonies by the Manhattan District Attorney last week were “not guilty.” But, politically, the most important thing is “electioneering.”
Trump’s repetition of those words, which have been picked up by other top Republicans, shows how he is trying to turn his historic position as the first former president to be charged with a crime to his advantage. This is another example of what he has been holding back throughout his political career – admitting without evidence that the election was rigged against him.
After appearing in the first court in the New York case, the first of several in legal jeopardy, Trump reviewed the various investigations he was facing and labeled it a “massive” attempt to interfere with the 2024 election.
“Our justice system is out of law,” Trump said as he appeared before supporters at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. “They are using it now, in addition to everything else, to win the election.”
Trump has made some version of the claim in at least 20 social media posts since March 3, most of which have come in the past two weeks, picking up as a Manhattan grand jury appears to be wrapping up its work and preparing to indict the former president. . Trump announced his latest bid for the White House shortly after the November midterms, which some in his orbit saw as an attempt to quell the various probes swirling around him.
Claiming the election was stolen from him is a routine Trump tactic, even though there is no evidence to support that assertion. While competing for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, Trump claimed his loss in the Iowa caucuses due to fraud. When he won the White House in November but lost the popular vote, Trump claimed the only reason he failed in the latter category was because undocumented immigrants voted. A task force formed to uncover voter fraud was disbanded without finding any evidence to support the claims.
In 2020, Trump began arguing that the election would be months before the election began. He attacked efforts to loosen the ban on postal voting during the coronavirus pandemic, and escalated the allegations after losing the election to claim he had actually won. The lie led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Federal and state election officials and Trump’s attorney general have said there is no credible evidence that the 2020 election has been tainted. The former president’s fraud charges have also been dismissed by courts, including Trump-appointed judges.
Trump is acting like a politician in the crosshairs of the law, said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist.
“He’s certainly not the first politician to be sued — sometimes reasonably, sometimes not — for playing the political victim card,” Levitsky said.
Levitsky, who wrote the book “How Democracies Die,” said that several former presidents of other countries, when prosecuted, said that they planned to cancel future elections. Most recently, it was the complaint of former Brazilian president Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva after he was jailed before the 2018 election. Silva was acquitted by his country’s supreme court and won the presidency again in October.
But the most important thing in Trump’s case is that his own party is calling for a stolen election before the next campaign. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said last month that he was directing party committee chairmen to “investigate whether federal funds are being used to undermine our democracy by meddling in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”
“That all parties carry this line is unusual,” Levitsky said.
Last week’s charges in a New York court stemmed from Trump’s payment to his lawyer, Michael Cohen, of money he paid during the 2016 presidential election to porn actress Stormy Daniels, with whom he claimed to have had an affair. Even some of Trump’s critics have seen the charges as New York legislation.
At the heart of the Manhattan case are prosecutors’ claims that Trump falsified business records at his company to pay for damaging stories during the campaign — an illegal effort by Trump, they say, to try to influence the election.
The former president also faces legal threats from other investigations, both related to his efforts to interfere in the 2020 election.
Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are investigating Trump’s January 2021 phone call to the state’s top election official asking him to “find” enough votes to declare Trump the winner there. The US Department of Justice has also launched a federal special counsel investigation into Trump’s efforts to try to erase his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump is also involved in a federal special counsel’s investigation into his handling of classified documents found at his Florida property.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, when asked at a press conference on Tuesday whether the timing of the case was political, responded by saying: “I bring the case when I’m ready.”
Bragg’s office declined to comment on Trump’s statement about “election interference,” as did the Justice Department.
Critics warn that Trump, once again, is spreading suspicions of fraud that could undermine democracy. “We’ve seen this film before,” Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of the United States, which tracks politicians who shamed Trump’s election, said in a statement. “We know it’s dangerous because we all saw what happened on January 6.”
Trump has routinely brushed off those warnings, seamlessly tying the current legal threat to the three-year-old false accusations of Democratic Party wrongdoing that led to his ouster.
At his first campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, a few days before the Manhattan indictment, Trump opposed the entire investigation and said his opponents used probes “because it’s harder to fill the ballot box, which is filled a lot.”
“The new weapon used by the out-of-control Democrats to rig the election is to investigate candidates,” he said.
Trump and other Republicans have sometimes contradicted themselves, dismissing the investigation as an effort to discredit Trump while also predicting it will help his bid for the White House.
“I think you’ll see the poll numbers go up,” Rep. Elise Stefanik, RN.Y., one of the president’s most vocal backers in the House, preached at the GOP conference last month. “He’s never been in a stronger position.” He condemned the allegations last week as “unprecedented election interference.”
Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, which has long criticized Trump’s allegations of election fraud, noted that the entire investigation of the former president began before he began to come forward again.
“No one is above the law, including the former president, and being president cannot and cannot be a shield against wrongdoing,” Scherb said.
___ Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.