Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that Donald Trump should have been more forceful during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach after the former president announced he was served with a target letter to appear at a grand jury investigation regarding the 2020 election.
Special counsel Jack Smith “sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social on Tuesday.
Reacting to the development, Mr. DeSantis told reporters that “I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn’t do anything while things were going on“ and that Mr. Trump ”should have come out more forcefully” as the incident unfolded on Jan. 6. He made those remarks during a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference.
Later, Mr. DeSantis said that the development is another sign of the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy and the Department of Justice (DOJ) against political enemies.
“But to try to criminalize that, that’s a different issue entirely,” Mr. DeSantis said regarding the former president’s activity on Jan. 6. “We want to be in a situation where you don’t have one side just constantly trying to put the other side in jail, and that unfortunately is what we’re seeing now.”
The Florida governor’s remarks about Mr. Trump’s alleged inactivity on that day are sure to draw criticism from the former president, who has a significant lead over Mr. DeSantis in polls. On social media, some conservative commentators lashed out at Mr. DeSantis for the claim and said it would further denigrate his 2024 chances.
Mr. DeSantis also weighed in on Jan. 6 last month when he was asked. “I wasn’t anywhere near Washington that day. I have nothing to do with what happened that day,” he said in New Hampshire.
“Obviously, I didn’t enjoy seeing, you know, what happened. But we gotta go forward on this stuff. We cannot be looking backwards and be mired in the past,” he said.
Both the White House and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have declined to comment on former President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was served with a target letter to appear at a grand jury investigation regarding the 2020 election.
Trump’s legal woes have so far failed to dent his efforts to win the 2024 Republican nomination. His lead in opinion polls has widened in recent months and his Republican rivals have largely supported him in the face of several criminal probes.
Several weeks ago, Mr. Trump was charged by Mr. Smith’s office for allegedly mishandling classified documents that were being kept at his Mar-a-Lago estate, which was the subject of an FBI raid in August 2022. The former president has pleaded not guilty.
In addition to the charges in the classified documents case, Mr. Trump faces New York state criminal charges accusing him of falsifying business records concerning a payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence before the 2016 election about an encounter she has alleged but he denies. He has pleaded not guilty in that case as well.
On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a bid by Mr. Trump to block a state investigation into whether he and his allies illegally attempted to meddle with Georgia’s 2020 election.
More than 1,000 people have been charged with crimes connected with the Capitol breach, including some who have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. On the Jan. 6 breach, Mr. Trump gave a rousing speech to supporters and alleged that there was election fraud that swung the results of the November 2020 election.
But during that speech, Mr. Trump offered a caveat to protesters that they protest “peacefully and patriotically.” A number of mainstream media outlets and House Democrats, in commenting on the incident, would omit those comments and instead focus on his remarks to a crowd that they should “fight like hell.”
Twitter and other social media outlets removed those posts and that video and suspended Mr. Trump’s accounts in the days after the Jan. 6 incident.
