On Saturday, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham spoke out against the former president’s possible indictment Donald Trump From the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Graham urged 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to fight back and “take the case to the Supreme Court.”
“The New York Attorney General has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than anyone in America today,” Graham, speaking from Charleston, South Carolina, said at Vision ’24, a prominent conservative Christian event.
Donald Trump (archive from Reuters)
“In New York City, you’re lucky if you don’t get robbed on your way to where you’re going. Is that really the most important thing that happens in Manhattan?”, referring to the focus on Trump rather than crime in New York. “I think this is an ongoing, never-ending effort to destroy Donald Trump and everything about Donald Trump,” he added.
Graham also questioned the legal reasoning behind the potential indictment, quoting a New York Times report as saying the potential charges are based on “untested, and therefore risky, legal theory.”
“They’re making up things they’ve never used against anyone because they hate Trump,” Graham said. “They’re brewing a legal cocktail to try and come up with an outlandish theory.”
“No one in New York has used the law, just because they hate Trump. You know why they do it? Because they’re afraid of Trump, that’s why they do it,” he warned.
Graham referred to the targeting of Trump as a “selective trial” and said that if he were in Trump’s place, he would “take all of this to the Supreme Court.”
The comments by Graham, who endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential race, followed reports that the Manhattan District Attorney’s office may be preparing to file an indictment over alleged payments to the porn actress that Trump made as a presidential candidate in 2016.
A court source told Fox News that the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will be meeting with law enforcement “to discuss logistics for some time next week, which means they expect an indictment next week.”
The potential indictment likely stems from the years-long investigation into Trump’s alleged cash-out scandal over pornographic actress Stormy Daniels.
Towards the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, Michael Cohen, Trump’s then-attorney, sent Daniels $130,000 to prevent her from revealing her affair with Trump in 2006, and paid the amount in instalments.
Like Senator Graham, other Republican lawmakers are also resisting Trump’s potential impeachment, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who said Saturday he is directing House committees to investigate whether federal funds are being used in “politically motivated prosecutions” like Trump’s.
The attorney general has been criticized for dropping half of the felony charges in Manhattan last year, including armed robbery of commercial businesses, and for his very lenient crime policies.
Republican Representative Claudia Tenney of New York said Bragg “allows violent criminals to walk the streets, yet he abuses the rule of law and the powers of his office to target political opponents in a partisan witch hunt. He is unfit for office.”
