Donald Trump continues to defy political gravity. Amid a bid to reclaim the presidency, he faces a third indictment, this time for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, which alone would spell doom for any other White House hopeful. Yet the former president — who has already been accused of mishandling national security documents and making hush money payments — remains the unquestionable front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024 with his chief rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, stuck in neutral. Speaking at a town hall in Iowa on Tuesday, Trump again cast the investigation as “election interference” by Democrats. He said he was “bothered” by the accusations because of how it affects his supporters. “I guess they want to try and demean and diminish and frighten people, but they don’t frighten us because we’re going to make America great again,” Trump said. The Associated Press has the story:
Trump calls Jan. 6 letter ‘Election Interference’
Newslooks- WASHINGTON (AP)
Former President Donald Trump joked about his legal challenges while campaigning in eastern Iowa on Tuesday night, just hours after announcing he’d received a target letter in the Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Headlining a Republican county meeting, Trump attacked investigators while trying to make light of what could be his third criminal indictment since March.
“I didn’t know practically what a subpoena was and grand juries. Now I’m becoming an expert,” he told the audience at an Elks Lodge in Cedar Rapids.
Trump also taped an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in front of a live audience, where he vented his frustrations. “It bothers me,” he said as he continued to cast the cases as politically motivated. “It’s a disgrace what’s happening to our country.”
The trip to the leadoff GOP voting state was yet another indication that, when it comes to Trump, none of the rules of politics ever apply. Trump did not cancel the trip to huddle with advisers, and he was not disinvited by organizers. Instead, he carried on as he has for months, incorporating his latest legal woes into his usual stump speech mixture of grievance, lies about the 2020 election, criticism of President Joe Biden and his agenda for a second term. For Trump, indictment news is now routine.
Iowa, with its caucuses just six months away, is a critical state for Trump, his party’s decisive early front-runner, and his rivals.
He set off for his latest trip just hours after announcing on his Truth Social platform that he had received a letter Sunday informing him that is the target of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the aftermath of the 2020 election and the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Such letters often precede indictments and are used to inform individuals under investigation that prosecutors have gathered evidence linking them to a crime.
Trump has already been indicted twice — once in New York and once in Florida — and also faces potential charges in a separate election interference investigation nearing its conclusion in Georgia, a stunning and unprecedented legal onslaught as he runs for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
But the indictments have yet to damage Trump’s standing. Instead, early polling shows Trump ahead of his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, by 20 to 30 points, or more.
The monthly meetings of the Linn County GOP, typically lightly attended affairs, have become somewhat more popular in recent months as representatives from various Republican presidential candidates’ campaigns have paid visits to build goodwill with party regulars.
But Tuesday’s gathering was far from ordinary. More than 150 people — many wearing Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” red hats — squeezed into the hall of the Elks Lodge on the city’s southwest side. Press covering the stop were cordoned behind the bar typically used for weddings and anniversaries.
At least as many Trump supporters remained outside the event, unable to get in, and were left on the sidewalk to greet the former president as he arrived and departed.
News of the target letter, said Linn County, Iowa, GOP chair Bernie Hayes, only emboldens the former president’s supporters.
“Does something like that engender sympathy? I think certainly it does,” Hayes said, as the small event room filled beyond the number of chairs set. “The man’s being persecuted, so they are just thinking of another way to persecute him.”
Some Iowa Republicans have said in interviews that the mounting legal battles Trump faces could make it difficult for him to govern if elected and that they have begun looking to alternatives. But Hayes said the developments have only strengthened the resolve of Trump supporters he talks to.
“If anything, people see President Trump is actually hardened by the trials he’s gone through and knows what he’s up against,” Hayes said.
Teresa Horton-Bumgarner from small-town Solon, east of Cedar Rapids, echoed that she and Republicans in her circle believe strongly the Biden administration is “using the judicial system as a political weapon.”
“Nothing that (Trump) did on Jan. 6, that I’ve ever seen that incited violence. He said to peacefully protest, and lawfully,” said Horton-Bumgarner, 56, who described the indictments against Trump as so “egregious” that Republicans “tend to rally behind him.”
Before his speech, Trump was interviewed on local radio, and railed against the investigations while dismissing potential negative fallout.
“The people of our great country, they fully understand what’s going (on). It’s election interference. It’s a weaponization of justice,” he said.
Speaking of his supporters, he said: “They are never leaving us because they want to make America great again. They’re with us. They have a passion like nobody’s ever had.”
The Jan. 6 probe has centered on a broad range of efforts by Trump and allies to keep him in office, including plans for slates of fake electors in multiple battleground states won by Biden to submit false electoral certificates to Congress.
Legal experts have said potential charges could include conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding, in this case Congress’ certification of Biden’s electoral victory.
In Washington, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said Trump’s supporters would not be turned off by the developments.
“We’ll see what they come up with …. but I tell you, the more they target Donald Trump? I mean, boy, the base, they just eat it up,” she said. “They see two systems of justice, one for Donald Trump and one for everybody else.”
Trump called a top GOP ally in the House, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, to rally Republicans against the investigation and discuss their strategy for going on offense, according to a person familiar with the conversation and granted anonymity to discuss it. Trump also spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the person said. McCarthy once criticized Trump over Jan. 6 but on Tuesday accused Democrats of trying to “weaponize government to go after their number one opponent.”
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, said that, with one indictment after the next, voters eventually “tune it out. It doesn’t have the weight or the meaning that it does when you’ve got this many things coming at you.”
“Now, on the other hand,” he added, “it also creates, I think, kind of a lot of noise and distraction that always seem to surround the former president. At what point does that have some effect on people’s opinions? I don’t know.“
A target letter sent to Donald Trump suggests that a sprawling Justice Department investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election is zeroing in on him after more than a year of interviews with top aides to the former president and state officials from across the country.
Federal prosecutors have cast a wide net, asking witnesses in recent months about a chaotic White House meeting that included discussion of seizing voting machines and about lawyers’ involvement in plans to block the transfer of power, according to people familiar with the probe. They’ve discussed with witnesses schemes by Trump associates to enlist slates of Republican fake electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden and interviewed state election officials who faced a pressure campaign over the election results in the days before the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
It is unclear how much longer special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation will last, but its gravity was evident Tuesday when Trump disclosed that he had received a letter from the Justice Department advising him that he was a target of the probe. Such letters often precede criminal charges; Trump received one ahead of his indictment last month on charges that he illegally hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.
Though it’s not known what charges Trump or anyone else might face in the election probe, the scope of the inquiry stands in stark contrast to Smith’s much narrower classified documents investigation. The vast range of witnesses is a reminder of the tumultuous two months between Trump’s election loss and the insurrection at the Capitol, when some lawyers and advisers aided his futile efforts to remain president while many others implored him to move on or were relentlessly badgered to help alter results.
A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment about the target letter or the interviews that prosecutors have conducted.
Even before Smith inherited the election interference probe last November, Justice Department investigators had already interviewed multiple Trump administration officials, including the chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence and former top lawyers at the White House, scrutinized post-election fundraising and seized as potential evidence the cellphones of numerous lawyers and officials.
Since then, Smith’s team has questioned senior administration officials including Pence himself before the grand jury in Washington and has conducted voluntary interviews with a wide array of witnesses inside and outside the federal government. Those include election officials in states where Trump associates waged fruitless efforts to get results overturned in the Republican incumbent’s favor.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was personally lobbied by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” to overtake Biden, has been interviewed by Smith’s team, as has Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, according to their representatives.
Wisconsin’s top elections administrator and election leaders in Milwaukee and Madison have spoken with federal investigators. And former Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who silenced a call from the Trump White House as he was publicly certifying Biden’s narrow victory in the state, has been contacted by Smith’s team, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
A consistent area of interest for investigators has been the role played by Trump lawyers in helping him cling to power, according to people familiar with the investigation who, like others interviewed for the story, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal probe.
John Eastman, a conservative law professor, advanced a dubious legal theory that said Pence could halt the certification of state electoral votes to block Biden’s win. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, promoted baseless claims of voter fraud and pushed an idea — vigorously opposed by Trump’s lawyers at the White House — that Trump had the authority under an earlier executive order to seize state voting machines.
Charles Burnham, a lawyer for Eastman, said Tuesday that his client had not received a target letter. “We don’t expect one since raising concerns about illegality in the conduct of an election is not now and has never been sanctionable,” he said. A lawyer for Powell declined to comment.
Multiple witnesses have been asked about a heated Dec. 18, 2020, meeting at the White House in which outside advisers, including Powell, raised the voting machines idea, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting, which devolved into a shouting match, featured prominently in a separate investigation by the House Jan. 6 committee, with former White House official Cassidy Hutchinson memorably describing it as “unhinged.”
Rudy Giuliani, a Trump lawyer who participated in the meeting and who spearheaded legal challenges to the election results, was asked about that meeting during a voluntary interview with Smith’s team and also detailed to prosecutors Powell’s involvement in failed efforts to overturn the election, according to a person familiar with his account. Giuliani has not received a target letter.
Giuliani’s interview was part of what’s known as a proffer agreement, the person said, in which a person agrees to speak voluntarily with investigators while prosecutors agree not to use those statements in any criminal case they might later bring. Prosecutors have worked to negotiate similar arrangements with other witnesses.
As prosecutors dig into efforts by Trump allies to thwart Biden’s victory, they’ve focused on the creation of slates of fake electors from key states captured by Biden who were enlisted by Trump and his allies to sign false certificates stating that Trump had actually won.
Smith’s team has also focused on Trump’s efforts to punish officials from his administration who refused to go along with his false election fraud claims. Chris Krebs, who was fired by Trump as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency after vouching for the integrity of the 2020 vote, was interviewed by prosecutors a couple of months ago about the perceived retaliation for his stance, according to a person familiar with the questioning.
Another person familiar with Smith’s investigation also said prosecutors in recent months have expressed interest in the ordeal of Ruby Freeman, a Georgia election worker who along with her daughter recounted to the House Jan. 6 committee how their lives became upended when Trump and allies latched onto surveillance footage to level since-debunked allegations of voter fraud.
