Former President Donald Trump received ovations during two different political events Saturday, in which he maintained his innocence related to the recent 37-count federal indictment against him. Speaking to the North Carolina and Georgia Republican Parties, the former president also sharply criticized special counsel Jack Smith.
During the event in Columbus, Georgia, Trump said that the charges were “ridiculous and baseless,” describing the Justice Department’s actions as “weaponized.”
The former president also described the indictment as “among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country.”
Georgia will re-elect President Trump for a THIRD time in 2024!
FOUR MORE YEARS!! pic.twitter.com/ZWOvh3o6kY
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) June 10, 2023
Trump said that his political opponents attempted to “frame me for treason, and now they’re trying it again.”
“These people are bad. They don’t stop. And we’ve got to get rid of them. They put our country through hell and they knew it was a lie,” he said. “They actually want to destroy our country.”
The 45th president called the indictment an effort to “interfere in our elections at a level that our country and few countries have ever seen before.”
Trump compared the prosecution over the sensitive documents to treatment in “Stalinist Russia or Communist China.”
He did, however, argue that the indictment helped his fundraising and poll numbers.
Furthermore, the former president turned his argument against other officials, stating that President Joe Biden has “boxes all over the place.” He also cited the secret email server operated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“But only Donald Trump is indicted and they take one charge and turn it into 36 charges,” Trump said
The former president called the current process a “political hit job” and referenced an increasingly-common conservative argument that there were two systems of justice in the United States.
He called Smith a “thug” and said that the nation either has “a deep state or we have a democracy. We’re going to have one or the other. And we’re right at the tipping point.”
“And either they win or we win. It’s very simple. They win or we win,” the former president said.
