A Republican official charged with overseeing elections in the state of Georgia, where Donald Trump tried and failed to change the results of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, lamented on Sunday that the ex-president was able to make himself out as a “martyr” to his supporters as he continues to face deepening legal problems.
Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer to Georgia’s secretary of state, watched his boss Brad Raffensperger survive a Trump-backed primary challenge in 2022 after Mr Raffensperger refused to go along with Mr Trump’s attempts to change the lawful election results.
He has long said that the former president’s efforts after the 2020 election were inappropriate, including an early January 2021 phone call between Mr Raffensperger and the president during which Mr Trump asked the Georgia elections chief to “find” him 11,000 votes.
That phone call and the effort by Mr Trump to change the results in Georgia are expected to result in a criminal indictment filed by Fulton County prosecutors within the next week or so; Fani Willis’s office is currently presenting evidence against the ex-president and his legal team to a grand jury.
A “special purpose” grand jury – unique under Georgia law – had previously been called in the matter, but that body did not have the final authority to approve or reject criminal indictments.
On Sunday, Mr Sterling spoke to ABC’s This Week about what he said was a troubling sign; that Republicans were flocking to Mr Trump as further consequences for his long-alleged criminal behaviour unfold.
"This has been giving oxygen to his campaign," Mr Sterling said. "This is raising tons of money, and a lot of that money ... is being used to pay for his lawyers.”
"He's making himself a martyr, and a lot of the American people are going behind him because they feel like some of these things are a little bit of a stretch," he said.
Complicating the narrative regarding Mr Trump’s criminal indictments is the very first of the actions taken against him by prosecutors: The charging of Mr Trump more than 30 times by officials in Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office over the Stormy Daniels affair which is alleged to have played out as far back as 2016. Mr Trump is charged with falsifying business documents to hide hush payments to Ms Daniels, an issue which some have said is being prosecuted far too late and as a result detracting from the credibility of the unrelated investigations into both Mr Trump’s efforts to change the 2020 election results and the discovery of classified defence materials at his properties.
Mr Trump remains the far-and-away leader of the 2024 GOP primary field, and has actively campaigned on the issue of his criminal charges, which he has portrayed as a weaponisation of the US justice system by Democrats.
He continues to deny wrongdoing in all matters, including his embrace of conspiracies that led to thousands of his supporters attacking the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
