Kathy Clark, a retired police officer from suburban Palm Beach County, stood alongside the road outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after the news broke, holding a “Trump Won” banner. Clark, dressed in a red, white and blue cowboy hat and vest, said the New York indictment would backfire.
“People who were on the fence are going to see how the government has politicised the judicial system,” she said.
Supporters of former US president Donald Trump outside Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida after his indictment.Credit:Bloomberg
Trump has promoted the idea that the investigations are partisan and intended to undermine his campaign as he embarks on his third bid for the White House. On his social media site, he cast prosecutors involved in the investigations as the ones endangering democracy.
Other supporters lined up quickly behind him, including West Virginia Attorney-General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, who called the indictment “a political witch hunt and a political prosecution. And the only reason they’re doing this is because they’re scared. They know that they can’t beat him at the ballot box. That’s why they’re resorting to these terrible tactics.”
Polls have shown that a majority of Republicans still support Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, suggesting they already believe he has been wronged by the system even though Biden’s win has been affirmed in multiple reviews, recounts and audits in the key presidential battleground states.
Trump’s attempts to overturn those results amid false claims of widespread fraud are at the heart of two other ongoing investigations, including his role in trying to halt the certification of the election results and in the run-up to the violent attack on the Capitol. A special prosecutor is looking into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, an investigation that could hold the greatest legal peril for the former president.
A separate investigation in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, is looking into the pressure Trump and others exerted on state officials to overturn the results of the presidential election there. The investigation began after a phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win.
The payment that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, made in 2016 to cover up an alleged sexual encounter with Daniels is the one that least involves an attack on democratic norms. But it is the detail that most easily lends itself to Trump’s contention that he is being attacked for partisan reasons.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said on CNN recently that the question was what happens after the indictment. If prosecutors fail to get a conviction, “I think the historians will look back and say that is the act that re-elected Donald Trump president”.
Diamond, the Stanford expert, said despite his nervousness of the New York case moving ahead first, it would not stop the others.
Trump supporters outside Mar-a-Lago on Friday.Credit:Bloomberg
“The other stuff is not going to simply evaporate, and I think for the purpose of the defence of our constitutional system and the defence of the rule of law … those are the ones that I think should carry the most weight in the public mind,” he said.
Roscoe Howard, a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia, said prosecutors in New York were aware of who they were dealing with and the turmoil that would follow. But he said they weren’t focused on public opinion or the political consequences of a case.
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Their concern is not about other investigations, but whether their case is ready to go to court, Howard said.
“There’s not a prosecutor in this country who will take a case to trial that they think they are going to lose. They just don’t do that.”
AP
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