The former president spoke on Fox News about his indictment for attempting to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election, saying he had “every right” to interfere in the vote.
A little sentence that did not go unnoticed. Asked on the conservative channel Fox News about his many legal setbacks, Donald Trump mentioned his impeachment for attempting to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Explaining how these procedures helped him climb in the polls, the former president said he had “every right” to “interfere” in an election.
“Anybody who heard that you were indicted for interfering with a presidential election, when you have every right to do that, you get indicted and your poll numbers go up. When people get indicted, your poll numbers go down,” Donald Trump said in a rambling statement that is his trademark.
Donald Trump still under investigation
The special counsel prosecuting Donald Trump for unlawful attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election released a revised indictment on Tuesday, August 27, which still brings the same serious charges against the former US president.
This document, which contains the same four counts as the previous one, was amended to take into account a Supreme Court ruling granting broad criminal immunity to the President of the United States.
The Republican billionaire therefore remains charged with “conspiracy against American institutions” and “violating the right to vote” of voters for his pressure on local authorities in several key states in order to invalidate the official results of the election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
The person concerned took offense in a series of messages on his Truth Social network, once again crying foul on the instrumentalization of justice by the outgoing Democratic administration and accusing the special prosecutor of “trying to resurrect a ‘dead’ witch hunt in an act of desperation.” Jack “Smith rewrote the exact same file in an attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision,” he adds.
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Presumption of immunity
In an unprecedented ruling on July 1, the country’s highest court granted the president of the United States broad criminal immunity.
By a majority of six to three – conservative justices against progressives – the Court held that “the president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts” but that he “is entitled to at least a presumption of immunity for his official acts.”
The court sent the case back to trial judge Tanya Chutkan to determine what acts are potentially immune from criminal prosecution. The burden is on the prosecution to show that they are not when they were committed in the exercise of presidential duties. The Supreme Court also excluded from prosecution all discussions between Donald Trump and the Justice Department until the end of his term.
As a result, prosecutors removed from the revised indictment a series of conversations or communications at the time of the events between Donald Trump and executive branch officials, particularly the Justice Department.
Thus, of the “six conspirators” listed in the original indictment, mainly lawyers involved in his alleged machinations, who were not identified by name, “Number 4”, a Justice Department official, has simply disappeared from the new version. As for the other five, “none of them was a government official at the time of the plot and all were acting in a private capacity”, the prosecutors emphasize.
The proceedings, frozen for nearly six months while waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the criminal immunity claimed by Donald Trump, resumed in early August. No new date for the trial, initially scheduled to take place in Washington from March 4, has yet been set. Targeted by four criminal proceedings, the Republican presidential candidate is pulling out all the stops to go to trial as late as possible, in any case after the November 5 election.
Donald Trump was found guilty on May 30 in New York of “aggravated false accounting to conceal a conspiracy to pervert the 2016 election” in the case of the payment of $130,000, disguised as legal fees, to buy the silence of pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels. But this first criminal conviction, unprecedented for a former American president, will in all likelihood be the only one before the vote and the sentencing, scheduled for September, could also be postponed due to the Supreme Court’s decision.
If re-elected, Donald Trump could, once inaugurated in January 2025, order a halt to federal prosecutions against him.
