LTP News Sharing:
Former President Trump addresses indictment under the Espionage Act over his handling of classified documents, and the slew of past investigations against him
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday said that “in a sick way” he enjoys the legal charges and investigations brought against him because they “expose” the motivations of his political opponents.
Speaking at the North Carolina Republican Party’s convention in Greensboro, Trump addressed the newly unsealed federal indictment accusing him of mishandling classified documents, as well as the various investigations targeting him since he was elected president in 2016.
“They launched witch hunt after witch hunt, and they just try to stop our movement,” said Trump. “They want to do anything they can to thwart the will of the American people. It’s called election interference. That’s what they’re doing now. And we’ve never seen it on a scale like this. The other side is downright crooked.”
Trump, who said Trump said he has “5,000 prosecutors” going after him, was indicted Friday on 37 federal counts, including willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice and false statements.
Trump also referenced the impeachment proceedings launched against him as well as the findings of Special Counsel John Durham, who last month released a final report on his investigation into the original probe concerning whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Durham found that there was never any information to justify opening the FBI’s investigation and that the bureau and the Department of Justice “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.”
“We beat it all off, didn’t we?” Trump said. “They put our country through hell, and they knew it was a lie the entire time.”
The former president then suggested that any Republican who becomes president will be the subject of similar investigations and on the receiving end of unending political attacks, arguing that anyone but him will crumble under such pressure.
“That person will not be able to withstand the fire,” he said. “And they actually admit it. They come to me: ‘How do you stand this?’ And I usually look at them and say, ‘In a sick way I sort of enjoy it, because it exposes them.’ It exposes them for what they are. And it’s also lifted the poll numbers to even higher legs.”
Trump touted poll numbers showing him comfortably ahead as the front-runner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Trump also directed his ire at President Joe Biden, calling him “corrupt.”
Earlier in the day, Trump delivered his first public remarks since being indicted, accusing Democrats of a “political hit job” against him and alleging a double standard in the Biden administration of justice.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW: A “DARK DAY” for the U.S.
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RELATED ARTICLES
Trump Savagely Destroys Biden In First Appearance Since Indictment News
By Sarah Arnold | Townhall.com
AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Former President Trump savagely criticizes the Biden Administration for unfairly attacking him regarding classified documents being found in his possession. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden was found guilty of the same thing.
“They took one charge, and they made it 36 different times. And we have a thug who is in charge. This is a political hit job; Republicans are treated far differently at the Justice Department than Democrats,” Trump said during his speech at the Georgia Republican state convention.
Trump accused Democrats of a “political hit job” as the 2024 Republican front-runner appears to garner mass support from American voters.
“We now have two standards of justice in this country,” Trump continued, accusing the Left of a double standard. “The Democrat communists want to jail their opponents while they protect the murderers who prowl our cities day and night and other brazen criminals.”
The 45th President called the second indictment against him a “joke,” suggesting the Democrat’s political witch hunt would backfire.
“They launched one hoax and witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement,” Trump said. “As far as the joke of an indictment, it’s a horrible thing. Such a horrible thing for this country. I mean, the only good thing about it is it’s driven my poll numbers way up. Can you believe it? It’s driven up, way up, and somebody said the fundraising is through the roof.”
Trump’s comments mark his first public appearance since the 37-count federal indictment was unsealed on Friday. The former President has denied any wrongdoing and claims he had declassified the materials before taking them from the White House.
“All of my documents fell under what is known as the Presidential Records Act, which is not at all a criminal act,” Trump said. “And this fake indictment, they don’t even once mention the Presidential Records Act, which is really the ruling — which is the case it falls under because they want something called the Espionage Act, which sounds terrible.”
Trump hit back at the Biden Administration’s weaponized Department of Justice, saying that his indictment will go down in history as one of the most horrific abuses of power.
“This vicious persecution is a travesty of justice,” Trump said, adding that the upcoming presidential election is no longer between Republicans and Democrats but between the “deep state” and democracy.
“Either we have 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,” he said. “And either they win, or we win. It’s very simple. They win, or we win.”
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Trump Makes First Speech Since Indictment, Attacks ‘Corrupt DOJ’s Double Standards’
By Mike Miller | RedState.com
Trump makes first public appearance since his federal indictment. Screenshot credit: Fox5 Atlanta
Saturday afternoon former President Donald Trump made his first speech since announcing on Truth Social that he had been indicted by a federal grand jury on criminal charges relating to his alleged mishandling of classified White House documents. The indictment, which was unsealed Friday, contains 37 felony counts, including willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding documents, corruptly concealing records, concealing documents in a federal investigation, scheming to conceal, and making false statements.
Trump, accompanied by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), spoke at the Georgia Republican Party convention. He was fired up, as one might expect, calling the indictment “election interference” and “a political hit job.” Referring to the indictment as “ridiculous” and “baseless,” Trump said:
The ridiculous and baseless indictment by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country.
[..]
They’ve launched one witch hunt after another to try and stop our movement, to thwart the will of the American people. … In the end, they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you.
Numerous legal experts weighed in after reading the indictment, including Jonathan Turley, Andrew McCarthy, Alan Dershowitz, and Mike Davis. While there were differences of opinion as to whether or not the Espionage Act applies and the role of declassification, legal experts on the conservative side of the aisle have all agreed that they believe the prosecution is politically motivated.
“Republicans are treated much differently at the Justice Department than Democrats,” Trump said, which is perhaps the understatement of the decade, given the multiple relentless attacks he’s endured from everyone from Nancy Pelosi to James Comey to Merrick Garland and the Justice Department.
To that point, Trump told the rally:
“Every time I fly over a blue state I get a subpoena. The only good thing about it is that it’s driven my poll numbers way up. Can you believe it?
“This vicious persecution is a travesty of justice. You’re watching Joe Biden [try] to jail his leading political opponent – an opponent that is beating him by a lot in the polls – just like they do in Stalinist Russia, or communist China. No different.
“Our country has gone very bad…Just think of it – in three years.
“Together we will stand up to globalists, the Marxists’ as well as ‘the communists, environmental extremists, the open border fanatics the radical left, the prosecutors and the fake news media.
“Our country has tears because of what’s happening. We have fake elections, we have no borders, we have inflation, we have – everything is just going wrong.
“We now have two standards of justice in our country. The Democrat Communists who jail their opponents while they protect the murderers who prowl our cities day and night, and other brazen criminals.
“To thunderous applause, Trump added, “No criminal is more protected than crooked Joe Biden.”
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO.
The Bottom Line
There is no bottom line, yet. Not one that matters, anyway.
While Trump’s case will play out the way it plays out — regardless of the opinions, considered or not from outside a Miami courtroom, the various House GOP investigations into Joe Biden and the Biden Family business will play out, as well.
With the 2024 presidential election 17 months away, If we’ve learned anything over the last several years, it’s that damn near anything can happen.
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Former AG William Barr is simply wrong about the Presidential Records Act
By Tom Fitton
The Presidential Records Act gives unreviewable
discretion to a president to designate and keep any record as personal!
If Barr is upset about this then he must ask Congress to change the law
and, arguably, the US Constitution.
TWEET
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Justice is hardly blind in the federal case going against Donald Trump
By Michael Goodwin | New York Post
Trump said Saturday he “will never yield” to President Biden’s
“Stalinist” tactics, his first comments since the unsealing of
a 49-page, 37-count federal indictment on charges of
mishandling classified documents. – Getty Images
Based on a grand jury search warrant, federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago and the evidence they gathered was bolstered with FBI interviews of Trump aides, employees and even his lawyers.
Weaving in seized texts and emails from key moments, prosecutors have created a compelling picture of their case, with Trump’s personality and habits of deception coming through loud and clear in the 49-page charging document.
However, I believe that if federal prosecutors had empaneled a grand jury and obtained a search warrant for Joe Biden’s properties and if FBI agents had put his aides, employees and lawyers under oath, scoured their phones and emails and confronted them with evidence to get them to talk, agents would have found that Biden knowingly kept classified documents for many years in his homes and offices, including in the four years between his being vice president and president.
Honest agents unencumbered by any political bias of their own or their bosses’ might also have discovered that Hunter Biden and other family members and associates had access to the supposedly secret documents and possibly used them in drawing up their lucrative business schemes with foreign officials and businesses.
other family members and associates reportedly had access to
supposedly secret documents and possibly used them in drawing
up lucrative business schemes with foreign officials. – Ouzounova / Shutterstock
Instead, a special counsel
assigned to the case appears to be about as vigorous as Joe.
I also believe that had the
Department of Justice empaneled a grand jury and executed a
search warrant on Hillary Clinton’s home and offices in 2013 or
2014 and seized her private computer server, phones and
electronic devices, along with the devices of her aides and
interviewed her lawyers under oath, FBI agents would have found
many thousands of unsecured critical documents that were still
in her possession long after she left the Department of State.
As it was, more than 2,000
documents deemed to be classified, top secret or confidential
were recovered from her devices in 2015 and 2016, despite the
fact that Clinton deleted some 33,000 emails she claimed were
not work-related.
Although the FBI oddly
accepted her claim, then-Director James
Comey said Clinton was wrong to use a private
server and there was evidence she and aides were “extremely
careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified
information.”
“None of these e-mails
should have been on any kind of unclassified system,” Comey said
before suddenly changing course and adding: “Although there is
evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the
handling of classified information, our judgment is that no
reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
James Comey said Hillary Clinton was wrong to use a private
server and there was evidence she and her aides were
“extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive,
highly classified information.” – Shutterstock
Comey was out of line in
publicly recommending against prosecution, but got away with it
— and so did Clinton.
It probably didn’t hurt
either one that Attorney General Loretta Lynch worked in the
Justice Department under President Bill Clinton and that Bill
and Loretta just happened to meet during the probe in an Arizona
airport and have a private conversation about, you know, golf
and grandkids.
Tale of three candidates
F. Scott Fitzgerald once
wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability
to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and
still retain the ability to function.”
For my money, that neatly
sums up the challenge presented by the
Trump indictment.
While his case will ultimately rise or fall on its merits, it is indisputable that Trump is being treated far more harshly than either Biden or Clinton were under very similar circumstances.
All three kept classified documents where and when they shouldn’t have.
Only one is being
prosecuted.
All three ran for president,
but only one had his campaign spied on by the FBI, an action
later found to be unwarranted.
And only one was the victim
of nonstop FBI leaks to the media alleging collusion with a
foreign power that helped undermine his presidency, even though
many of the leaks were found to be misinformation.
Does it matter that the one
person subjected to these extreme measures by the government and
media is a Republican, while the other two are Democrats?
Only a fool or a liar would
deny the obvious.
Trump haters, some of whom
call themselves journalists, justify that sordid history of
misconduct against him by calling him every vile epithet under
the sun.
He had it coming, they say,
and believe he had no right ever to be president.
There is no concern of the
unprecedented nature of the charges, only jubilation that he is
the first former president in American history to be charged
with federal crimes.
Many fantasize he will die
in prison.
jury search warrant, federal agents raided Mar-a-Lago and the
evidence they gathered was bolstered with FBI interviews of
Trump aides, employees and even his lawyers. – BACKGRID
Bias just like old Times
The New York Times, which
never fails to reveal its agenda, moaned that the Miami judge
assigned to the case was appointed by Trump and “has shown him
favor.”
The assumption seems to be
that a Biden appointee would be more fair.
Really?
One does not have to think
Trump is an angel, or even innocent in the current case, to
believe there is something very rotten in Washington.
Two standards of justice,
open and notorious, are doing more harm to American democracy
than Trump could do in two lifetimes.
The decline of trust in
government, including the once-hallowed FBI, mostly reflects
actions taken by Democrats in recent years to gain or keep
power.
As special prosecutor John
Durham recently concluded, there was no
justification for the FBI to open a case against Trump’s 2016
campaign, even as it inexplicably delayed or ignored potential
avenues of investigation against Clinton’s family foundation.
And don’t forget that the
phony Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, helped
fuel the FBI’s zeal to nail Trump.
Think what that means: The
Justice Department, with the knowledge of the Democratic White
House, meddled in a presidential election with the aim of
electing the Democrat and defeating — and perhaps prosecuting —
the Republican.
And here we go again.
The federal case against
Trump now, even if it meets the standard of the law, cannot be
divorced from the recent history of election meddling, given
that he is the leading
GOP candidate against Biden.
In five years, perhaps a
future Durham will look back on these events and write another
report chronicling how the party in power again weaponized law
enforcement to control an election.
In a brief statement
defending the 37 charges against Trump, special counsel Jack
Smith insisted there was nothing unusual
about the case, saying, “We have one set of laws in this country
and they apply to everybody.”
prosecutor John Durham recently concluded, there was no
justification for the FBI to open a case against Trump, even
as it inexplicably delayed or ignored potential avenues of
investigation against Clinton’s family foundation. – REUTERS
Please, save it for civics
class.
In reality, Biden appointed
Attorney General Merrick
Garland, who appointed Smith.
Whether he likes it or not,
the buck stops on Biden’s desk, especially because Biden let it
be known more than a year ago he wanted Trump prosecuted.
Does anyone really believe
it’s just a coincidence that Smith, under Garland’s guidance,
has delivered what the boss wanted?
Meanwhile, Biden has a lot
of dirty laundry himself, but Garland is protecting him.
Consider the evidence.
The Hunter Biden probe, now
in its fifth year, reeks of favoritism, a charge leveled against
it by IRS and FBI whistleblowers.
The evidence of various
crimes has been public for years, and Joe’s connection is
provable.
Nearly three years ago, he
was identified as the “big guy” scheduled to get a secret 10%
cut in a multimillion-dollar family deal with Chinese
communists.
Those charges, based on The
Post’s stories about the contents of Hunter’s abandoned laptop,
were censored by Big Tech at the direction of the FBI.
The Ukraine $torm
Then there’s the newest
dimension to Joe’s likely misconduct — the discovery that the
FBI has been sitting on a charge since 2017, and renewed at
least twice since by an informant, that he accepted a $5 million
bribe from a Ukrainian businessman.
Reports say Hunter also got
$5 million in the same deal, and there are suggestions the money
came from the head of Burisma, the corrupt energy company that
hired Hunter for its board of directors and paid him millions
while Joe was Obama’s point man for Ukraine.
Where’s the grand jury on
that case?
Where are the subpoenas for
Biden’s bank records and a house raid searching for evidence?
Where is the media
firestorm?
Nowhere, that’s where,
because Garland and the FBI have been sitting on the Biden bribe
allegation without either confirming it or dismissing it.
We know the allegation
exists only because a tipster told congressional Republicans,
who demanded to see the FBI report of the informant’s story.
The possibility of Joe
Biden’s guilt has many implications, including the specter that
Congress impeached the wrong man in 2019.
House Democrats impeached
Trump over a phone call with the president
of Ukraine, in which Trump asked for help investigating
whether the Bidens engaged in corrupt actions there when Joe was
vice president.
It was an unfair, purely
partisan impeachment under any circumstances, but even more so
if Biden really was guilty of corruption.
Had that been discovered
then, Trump would have been re-elected and Biden would be the
one facing criminal charges.
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Democrats Had Better Be Careful What They Wish for After the Latest
Trump Indictment
BY CHRIS QUEEN | P J MEDIA
AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall
Regardless of what you think about the Trump indictment, it’s hard not to believe that it smacks of the Democrats’ endless attempts to nail Donald Trump for — something. We’ve gotten used to it over the past few years, and these legal maneuvers always seem to play out the same way.
“We’re all familiar with the ‘Trump facing…’ news loop by now,” writes Freddy Gray at The Spectator. “America is stuck in Trump legal groundhog day — he’s remorselessly prosecuted, over and over, on so many fronts. He always responds the same way, protesting his INNOCENCE in capital letters on Truth Social, saying he can’t believe this is happening in America. Then his team fires out fundraising emails.”
Maybe they have him this time, but maybe not. After all, we’ve heard the rhetoric about the “walls closing in” on Trump for a long time now.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO: “The Walls Are Closing In on Trump”
What seems to be missing from the Democrats’ calculus in indicting Trump again (with potentially more indictments to follow) is that the whole scheme could backfire on them tremendously. They don’t seem to be aware of the precedent they’re setting with these indictments.
The Democrats are clearly counting on being able to knock Trump out of the 2024 election cycle, but they apparently haven’t given much thought to the idea that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Revenge against the Democrats is always on the table, and it could come in the form of a second Trump term or another Republican president who is happy to give the Biden crime family the same treatment.
Hell hath no fury like Donald Trump scorned, and don’t we all know that Trump 2.0 would become a four-year revenge tour? The Oval Office would become the world headquarters of vengeance.
“Should Trump return to office, expect him to embark on a four-year race for vengeance in hunting down his enemies,” Ben Domenech points out at Spectator World. “And given that he won’t be able to run for re-election, there will be no brakes.”
PJ Media’s own Robert Spencer wrote earlier this week about former FBI director James Comey suggesting that Democrats “think about what four years of a retribution presidency might look like. He could order the investigation and prosecution of individuals who he sees as enemies — I’m sure I’m on the enemies list — because the president constitutionally does oversee the Executive Branch entirely, which includes the Department of Justice, prosecutors, and investigators. And so he could commission, direct, that individuals be pursued.”
The possibilities certainly are endless, but it doesn’t have to be Trump enacting the revenge. It’s not hard to imagine another Republican president turning the tables on the Democrats, not necessarily to avenge Trump but to make the Democrats pay for weaponizing the federal government. It would serve the Democrats right, even if it’s a bad precedent to set.
“We do not want to become the kind of nation where part of the job of being commander-in-chief is understanding that at the end of your time in office, you will be sued to the nth degree at every opportunity by your political enemies in any jurisdiction,” Domenech writes. “That invites ruthless people willing to bear such attacks in pursuit of raw power, the same people likely to deploy them against others.”
He’s not wrong. Politics is ugly enough as it is, and to bring the constant p***ing contest of one-upmanship and revenge for the last administration into the mix would be even more unbearable. Still, the Democrats have it coming for their ruthless and relentless pursuit of trying to nail Donald Trump for some crime.
