Former President Donald Trump’s allies took to the airwaves on Sunday to defend the former president from the federal indictment unveiled last week that charged him with 37 felony counts connected to his handling of classified documents after leaving office.
Trump himself called the historic indictment “ridiculous” and “baseless” in a speech on Saturday.
One of Trump’s attorneys, Alina Habba, who does not represent him in the federal case, told “Fox News Sunday” the charges were “completely politically motivated” and “election interference at its best.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, echoed Habba’s insinuation the charges were an attempt by President Joe Biden to derail his chief Republican rival.
“People who are doing it is the administration, the Justice Department from his opponent in the upcoming presidential election. This is as political as it gets,” Jordan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “And frankly, it’s part of a pattern. We’ve seen time and time again with the president over the last seven years. They try one thing and they try another, they’ve continued to go after [Trump] and I think anyone with common sense can see that.”
Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary committee, used his time on CNN to claim Trump had declassified the documents in question as president and they were held securely — in a bathroom, a ballroom, and a basement at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida — with protection from the Secret Service.
But the indictment from special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to independently investigate the former president, directly contradicts Jordan’s claims. The Secret Service provides protection to Trump and his families, prosecutors wrote, but had no role in the security of the documents and were apparently not even told by Trump that he was storing dozens of boxes of classified material throughout his property.
The indictment also includes a transcript of a conversation Trump allegedly had with a staffer where he is showing a classified plan to a foreign nation to a writer interviewing him for a book. In the transcript, Trump appears to admit he possessed documents that he did not declassify while still in office, an authority sitting presidents have, seemingly undercutting his defense.
“See as president I could have declassified it,” Trump said, according to the transcript of the July 21, 2021 conversation. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
“If he wants to store material in a box in a bathroom, he wants to store it in a box on the stage, he can do that. That is just what the law and the standard is,” Jordan said, adding he wasn’t bothered by Trump allegedly directing aides to move boxes of documents to avoid their discovery by federal investigators because “you can’t have obstruction of something when there was no underlying crime.”
That there can be no obstruction of justice without an underlying crime was an argument Bill Barr made while serving as U.S. Attorney General under Trump at the conclusion of the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the 2016 campaign and Russian interference.
But on Sunday, Barr viewed the federal indictment differently than some of his Republican colleagues.
“If even half of it is true, then he’s toast. It’s a very detailed indictment and it’s very, very damning, ” Barr said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Yes, he’s been a victim in the past. Yes, his adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims and I’ve been at his side defending against them when he is a victim. But this is much different. He’s not a victim here. He was totally wrong.”
In their media appearances Sunday, Jordan, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., all compared the investigation into Trump to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to store government emails when she was Secretary of State.
The FBI ultimately recommended prosecutors not press charges and a State Department investigation in 2019, when Trump was president, determined there was “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” by Clinton.
“President Ford decided it was best for America not to pursue prosecution against President Nixon. President Trump pretty much made the same decision to decide not to pursue any kind of prosecution of Hillary Clinton,” Johnson said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“Joe Biden could have made the exact same decision, but he didn’t,” Johnson added. “He allowed a SWAT raid on a very secure residence of President Trump over federal records, even though he was holding classified records himself.”
Biden, who continuously insists he does not interfere with the Justice Department’s independence, is himself the subject of an investigation by a separate special counsel after classified documents were found at his home and office from his time as vice president. Biden’s team has said they worked swiftly to alert and hand over the documents to federal authorities, drawing a contrast to Trump who is alleged to have tried to hide documents from investigators.
The Justice Department declined to prosecute Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, earlier this month for similarly possessing classified documents after leaving office.
Graham continuously pivoted to discussing Clinton’s emails on ABC’s “This Week,” but said of Trump, “I’m not justifying his behavior.”
“If it were up to me, nobody would take classified information,” Graham said, while standing by his endorsement of Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. “What’s happening here is they’re trying to delegitimize him.”
Other Republicans took it even further, with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., charging on Fox News that “Joe Biden wants to give Donald Trump a death sentence for documents.”
“They want him to die in jail. And yet Hillary Clinton is standing free today,” Mace said.
Trump’s competition in the GOP primary had mixed responses to the indictment. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decried the “weaponization of federal law enforcement” when news of the charges broke on Thursday and pledged his administration would “bring accountability” to the Justice Department.
On Sunday, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said he was “even more convinced” of his promise to pardon Trump on his first day in office. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who was previously a federal prosecutor, called Ramaswamy’s pledge “simply wrong” and reiterated his call for Trump to drop out of the race.
“These are serious allegations that are relevant in this campaign and it should not be dismissed lightly,” Hutchinson told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “The Republican Party stands for the rule of law and our system of justice. Let’s not undermine that by our rhetoric, by making up facts and by accusing the Department of Justice of things there is no evidence of.”
“I think as time goes on, you’ll see more Republicans responding to that message,” Hutchinson added.
For now, the vast majority of Republicans remain on Trump’s side as he leads the pack heading into the 2024 primaries. A CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday found 61% of likely GOP primary voters want Trump to be the nominee, with only one other candidate in the field logging double-digit percentage point support: DeSantis at 23%.
The poll began querying respondents prior to the indictment, but among those asked after it became public, 76% said they believed it was politically motivated and 12% said they believed it was both a political prosecution and that the documents were a national security risk. And 61% said their opinion of Trump wouldn’t change, with another 14% saying the federal charges changed their view of the former president for the better.
