Trump Decries Criminal Charges: My ‘Only Crime’ Was To ‘Fearlessly Defend Our Nation’

Former President Donald Trump held a rally at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, where he spoke to supporters and criticized the criminal charges brought against him by Alvin Bragg, the New York prosecutor. Trump declared himself a victim of election interference and expressed shock that this could happen in America. He pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a Manhattan court, where prosecutors accused him of arranging payments to two women to silence their reports of sexual encounters with him before the 2016 election. The former president is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, and despite criticizing the prosecutors, he did not call for new protests from his supporters during his 25-minute speech. He accused Manhattan District Attorney Bragg of being out to get him and called the judge in his case a “Trump-hating judge.”

Although Trump criticized the legal cases against him, some of his own critics such as former national security adviser John Bolton and Senator Mitt Romney (R., Utah) also found the indictment against the former president politically weak. A Politico report also revealed that the legal punditocracy was underwhelmed by the case against him.

Trump expressed particular concern about the documents case being investigated by special counsel Jack Smith, referring to him as a “lunatic” on multiple occasions. He also called the various legal cases against him, such as the probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and the election interference case from the 2020 election in Georgia, an attempt to block his third run for the presidency.

During his rally, Trump was surrounded by a number of his most ardently combative supporters, including Republican lawmakers Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, long-time operative Roger Stone, pillow maker Mike Lindell, and former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, as well as Trump’s own sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

Reporting by Nathan Layne and Rich McKay in Palm Beach; Writing by Steve Holland; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Grant McCool.