Former President Donald Trump said he might push the Justice Department to investigate his political opponents if he wins the 2024 race for the White House, suggesting that the several indictments he’s been hit with have released the retaliation “genie out of the box.”
“Well, he’s unleashed something that everybody, we’ve all known about this for a hundred years,” President Trump said, presumably referring to President Joe Biden and his administration.
Not long ago, the notion that a former president—much less the frontrunner by far for the Republican presidential nomination and the incumbent president’s main rival—would face major legal troubles that could land him in jail was almost inconceivable.
Yet that is now the reality confronting the former president, who faces 91 felony counts in four criminal cases in Washington, New York, Florida, and Georgia. If convicted, he could potentially be looking at years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty and insisted that all the charges are part of a plot to upend his chances at a political victory in 2024.
In the interview on Univision, President Trump claimed prosecutors have “done indictments in order to win an election,” accusing the Biden administration of breaking with the precedent of not targeting political rivals with investigations and indictments.
“We’ve watched other countries do it and, in some cases, effective and in other cases, the country’s overthrown or it’s been totally ineffective,” President Trump said.
“But we’ve watched this for a long time, and it’s not unique, but it’s unique for the United States. Yeah. If they do this and they’ve already done it, but if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse,” he continued.
“It could certainly happen in reverse. What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box,” he added.
Denials
Two federal criminal cases against the former president were brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, an appointee of Attorney General Merrick Garland—who in turn has denied weaponizing the agency he helms for political purposes.“Our job is not to do what is politically convenient. Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” Mr. Garland—who leads the Department of Justice (DOJ)—told lawmakers in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in late September.
Mr. Garland was responding to allegations from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a staunch Trump ally, that the DOJ has been politically weaponized against the former president.
“There’s one investigation protecting President Biden, there’s another one attacking President Trump,” Mr. Jordan claimed in his opening statement during the hearing. “The Justice Department’s got both sides of the equation covered.”
Many Republicans contend that the DOJ has failed to fully probe the allegations against President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who faces federal tax and gun charges.
They have also argued that the various investigations against President Trump lack substance and amount to election interference.
For his part, President Biden has denied putting pressure on the DOJ to charge his chief political rival with crimes.
“You’ll notice I have never once, one single time suggested the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bring in a charge or not bring a charge,” President Biden said in June, not long before President Trump was indicted on charges of improperly handling classified documents.
Despite the string of statements by the president and his top lieutenants that the investigations against President Trump are anything but legitimate, the former president has made clear he’s not buying any of those denials.
“They call it weaponization, and the people aren’t going to stand for it,” President Trump said, before adding: “I mean, if somebody—if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ Mostly what that would be, you know, they would be out of business. They‘d be out, they’d be out of the election,” he said, suggesting that the various charges brought against him amount to—as he has repeatedly contended—election interference.
President Trump’s remarks at a rally in Hialeah, Florida, on Wednesday night, echoed that view.
“Now that he indicted me, we’re allowed to look at him. But he did real bad things,” President Trump said at the rally, adding that he would press the DOJ “to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America.”
