Trump Speaks Out in Interview After Georgia Indictment

Former President Donald Trump leaves at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa, on Aug. 12, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Hours after former President Donald Trump was indicted for the fourth time this year, he gave an interview to Fox News Digital about the most recent case and its significance.

“Nineteen people were indicted, and the whole world is laughing at the United States as they see how corrupt and horrible a place it has turned out to be under the leadership of Crooked [President] Joe Biden,” President Trump said. The grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, had indicted the former president along with 18 alleged co-conspirators, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his former attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell, with a total of 41 charges.

All defendants were charged with racketeering in the 98-page indictment, which carries a penalty up to 20 years in prison.

“This politically-inspired indictment, which could have been brought close to three years ago, was tailored for placement right smack in the middle of my political campaign, where I am leading all Republicans—by a lot—and beating Joe Biden soundly in almost all polls,” President Trump said, repeating his assertion that the multiple charges brought against him this year amount to “election interference.” President Biden, meanwhile, has kept quiet on the issue and avoided commenting on the cases.

Late on Monday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis gave a brief press conference during which she said she intended to try all 19 defendants together. Arrest warrants have been issued already, and Ms. Willis said she was allowing defendants to voluntarily surrender by noon on Aug. 25.

Clashes

In the Monday interview, President Trump again accused Ms. Willis, a Democrat, of acting out of political and personal bias.

He pointed out her district’s rising crime rates while she recently opened a new fundraising website “in order to benefit off the things she most campaigned on, ‘I will get Donald Trump,’” he said.

He called the indictment “a continuation of the greatest and longest-running Witch Hunt in American history,” adding that it is “not even conceivable that a person with such a record of failure could be allowed to interrupt perhaps the most important election in the history of our country.”

Previously, after the 45th president’s third indictment, his team ran campaign ads highlighting the “witch hunt,” including one singling out Ms. Willis and what it called her vendetta against the former president.

In an email obtained by the Associated Press, Ms. Willis told her staff not to comment on it. “We have a job to do. In this office, we prosecute based on the facts and the law,“ she wrote. ”This is business, it will never be personal.”

Ms. Willis, who was elected in 2020, began her investigation into the 2020 Georgia General Election last year, and a special grand jury with subpoena power was seated May 2022. That jury produced a report that President Trump’s legal team tried to quash on the basis of a potential conflict of interest, alleging Ms. Willis was biased and should be removed from the case. A judge rejected both motions, ruling that the “prosecutor is not a neutral party and does not need to pretend to be.”

Former President Trump said in his Monday interview that Ms. Willis “should focus on the people that rigged the 2020 presidential election, not those who demand an answer as to what happened.”

“Just like she has allowed Atlanta to go to hell with all of its crime and violence, so too has Joe Biden allowed the United States of America to go to the same place with millions of people invading our country, inflation, bad economy, no energy, and lack of respect all over the world,” he said.

Partisan Reactions

As with President Trump’s previous indictments, Republican supporters of the GOP frontrunner echoed his claims of “election interference” while Democrats celebrated the latest indictment as just.

“Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election. Now a radical DA in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans see through this desperate sham,” posted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), referring to Ms. Willis.

“The fourth indictment of Donald Trump, just like the three which came before it, portrays a repeated pattern of criminal activity by the former president,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) in a statement. “This latest indictment details how Mr. Trump led a months-long plot pushing the Big Lie to steal an election, undermine our democracy, and overturn the will of the people of Georgia.”

Gabriel Sterling, who currently serves as the chief operating officer at the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, pointed out that the legal charges have only “been giving oxygen to his campaigns; this is raising tons of money.”

“And a lot of that money now is I think, was pointed out earlier, it’s being used to pay for his lawyers and not for an actual campaign,” he told ABC’s This Week. “But it’s driving him being ahead because he is [making] himself a victim. He’s made himself a martyr. And a lot of the American people are growing behind him.”