Republicans rallied to Donald Trump’s defense after the former president was indicted on 13 criminal charges in Georgia over his attempt to overturn his defeat there by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the US House, said: “Justice should be blind, but Biden has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election.”
Trump faces 91 criminal charges in all, also regarding hush-money payments to an adult film star, retention of classified information and federal election subversion.
Regardless, he dominates Republican primary polling, leading his closest challengers nationally and in early voting states by about 40 points.
Referring to Fani Willis of Fulton county, McCarthy continued: “Now a radical [district attorney] in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans see through this desperate sham.”
Trump has long used his legal predicament as a fundraising engine, both for his campaign and as a way to pay his increasingly mountainous legal bills.
On Monday night, after charges were filed in Georgia, an email soliciting donations bemoaned a “FOURTH ACT of Election Interference on behalf of the Democrats in an attempt to keep the White House under Crooked Joe’s control and JAIL his single greatest opponent of the 2024 election”.
Republicans in Congress remained firmly on Trump’s side.
New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a member of House leadership, insisted Trump “had every legal right to challenge the results of the election” he conclusively lost.
She added: “This blatant election interference by the far left will not work, President Trump will defeat these bogus charges and win back the White House in 2024.”
In the Senate, Ted Cruz of Texas, in 2016 Trump’s closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, said he was “pissed”. Cruz also called the Georgia indictment “disgraceful” and repeated McCarthy’s “weaponization” complaint – a party talking point.
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally who briefly deserted him over the January 6 attack on Congress but swiftly came back onside, told Fox News: “The American people can decide whether they want [Trump] to be president or not.
“This should be decided at the ballot box and not in a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail. They’re weaponizing the law in this country. They’re trying to take Donald Trump down.”
Among Republicans aiming to take Trump down – the other candidates in the presidential primary field – many were slower to respond.
On Tuesday, Ron DeSantis, the second-placed candidate in most polls, told reporters the Georgia indictment was “an example of this criminalization of politics. I don’t think that this is something that’s good for the country.”
DeSantis also accused Willis of using an “inordinate amount of resources” on the Trump case while failing to tackle crime.
Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor now challenging DeSantis for second place in New Hampshire, also questioned Willis’s motives.
The indictment was “unnecessary”, Christie, himself a former prosecutor, told Fox News, adding that indicting Trump was “probably an ego decision”.
Christie said he last spoke to Trump in December 2020, amid Trump’s schemes to overturn the election. Christie said he told the man he endorsed four years before: “There’s nothing left. You need to concede the election.”
Trump, he said, responded: “I will never, ever, ever admit it.”
On social media, the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has polled surprisingly strongly, said: “I’d volunteer to write the amicus brief to the court myself: prosecutors should not be deciding US presidential elections, and if they’re so overzealous that they commit constitutional violations, then the cases should be thrown out and they should be held accountable.”
Ramaswamy also echoed the Trump campaign in seizing on a mistake in which a version of the indictment was posted on a court website on Monday afternoon and then swiftly deleted, all while grand jury testimony continued.
“Since the four prosecutions against Trump are using novel and untested legal theories,” Ramaswamy said, “it’s fair game for him to do the same in defence: immediately file a motion to dismiss for a constitutional due process violation for publicly issuing an indictment before the grand jury had actually signed one.
“He should make a strong argument on these grounds and it would send a powerful message to the ever-expansive prosecutorial police state.”
The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who like Christie has set himself against Trump, said: “Over a year ago, I said that Donald Trump’s actions disqualified him from ever serving as president again. Those words are more true today than ever before.”
Another anti-Trump candidate, the former congressman Will Hurd, like Hutchinson a vanishingly small presence in polling, called the Georgia indictment “another example of how the former president’s baggage will hand Joe Biden re-election if Trump is the nominee”.
Bemoaning “further evidence that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election and was ready to do anything it took to cling to power”, Hurd said the former president would “use this latest indictment as another opportunity to manipulate Americans into paying his legal bills”.
