:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/grupoclarin/ADDXLX3NHFF57PT4SVC2M65ZV4.jpg "Among legal problems, Trump demands Republican support and the resignation of his rivals")
Donald Trump, embroiled in mounting legal troubles, on Saturday stepped up calls for his Republican rivals to drop the race for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination and threatened Republican congressmen in the primaries not to focus on investigating the Democratic president. , Joe Biden, in addition to urging them to paralyze military aid to Ukraine until the White House cooperates in the investigations into Biden and his family.
“Every dollar spent by Republicans attacking me is a dollar going directly to the Biden campaign,” Trump said at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. The former president and front-runner in the Republican primary said it was about time Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others he called “clowns” retire, accusing them of “wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans they should be using to create a huge vote-gathering operation” and defeat Biden in November.
Two days before Trump’s rally, federal prosecutors unsealed new criminal charges against Trump in the case accusing him of illegally storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and refusing to turn them over to investigators. The indictment released Thursday alleges that Trump and two employees attempted to remove surveillance footage at the club in an effort to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation.
The case is just one of Trump’s growing legal problems. His team is preparing for possible new charges, which could begin next week, in connection with his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, brought forward by prosecutors in Washington and Georgia. Trump is already facing criminal charges in New York over payments to silence women who accused him of having sex with them during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Yet Trump remains the front-runner in the Republican nomination race, his lead only growing as the charges piled up, while his rivals have been at a loss to respond. The defiance came to the fore Friday night at a Republican rally, in which his rivals refused to attack Trump directly. The only one who did, accusing the favorite of “showing up to avoid jail”, was booed as he left the stage.
For his part, Trump has raised his legal problems and made them the center of his campaign to return to the White House, accusing Biden of using the Justice Department to persecute his main political rival. The White House has reiterated that the president has not been involved in the cases.
At his rallies, Trump has tried to portray the charges, which include serious prison threats, as attacks not only on him but on his supporters.
“They are not accusing me, they are accusing you. I’m just in the middle,” Trump told the audience in Erie.
But the investigations also divert enormous resources that would otherwise go to support the campaign.
The Washington Post said Saturday that Trump’s political action committee, Save America, would report on Monday spending more than $40 million in legal fees in the first half of 2023 to defend Trump and current and former employees. those financed by lawyers. The total is more than what the campaign raised in the second quarter of the year.
At Saturday’s rally, in a former Democratic stronghold that Trump won in 2016 but where Biden narrowly prevailed in 2020, Trump also threatened Republican lawmakers who refuse to join efforts to impeach Biden. . House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said this week that Republican lawmakers may consider impeaching the president over unproven allegations of financial misconduct.
Trump, who went through two impeachments during his tenure, said Saturday that “the biggest complaint I get is that Republicans find this information and then do nothing about it.”
“Any Republican who doesn’t take action against Democratic fraud should go to the primaries immediately and go out, go!” he told the crowd to loud applause. “They have to play hardball and…if they’re not willing to play it, we’ve got a lot of good, tough Republicans…and they’ll have my support every time.”
In the 2022 midterm elections, in which several congressmen and governors were chosen, Trump set himself the goal of punishing those who had voted in favor of his second impeachment and managed to oust the majority by supporting his rivals in the elections. primaries.
At the rally, Trump also called on congressional Republicans to stop authorizing more military aid to Ukraine, embroiled in a war against a Russian invasion, until the Biden administration cooperates with Republican inquiries into Biden and his family’s businesses.
“He is dragging into a global conflict on behalf of the same country, Ukraine, that apparently paid his family all those millions of dollars,” Trump said.
House Republicans are investigating the finances of the Biden family, especially payments the president’s son Hunter received from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that was implicated in Trump’s first impeachment trial.
An anonymous confidential FBI source claimed that representatives of Burisma attempted to pay the Bidens in 2015 and 2016 $5 million each in exchange for their help in deposing a Ukrainian prosecutor who was allegedly investigating the company. But a Justice Department audit in 2020, when Trump was president, was closed eight months later without finding sufficient evidence of malpractice.
Trump’s first impeachment trial in the House of Representatives involved charges that he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to find damaging information about the Bidens while threatening to limit their military aid. Trump was later acquitted in the Senate.