Former President Donald Trump’s Republican allies in Congress rushed to his defense following his latest criminal indictment, this time accusing the Biden administration of timing the discharge to divert attention from damaging news concerning the current president and his son.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s second indictment against Trump alleges he unlawfully tried to overturn his election loss to President Joe Biden within the 2020 election. The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday afternoon, charges Trump with conspiring to defraud america and impede the certification of the election results.
In the future earlier, a former business partner of Hunter Biden testified that the younger Biden put his father on the phone during business meetings about 20 times, in keeping with U.S. House members.
But that ex-associate, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee in closed-door testimony that the Bidens “never once spoke about any business dealings” during those calls, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., told reporters.
“As he described it, it was all casual conversation, niceties, the weather, what is going on on. There wasn’t a single conversation about any of the business dealings that Hunter had,” Goldman said of Archer’s testimony.
Quite a few GOP lawmakers and other supporters of Trump were quick to link the timing of Archer’s testimony to Smith’s indictment.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., asserted Tuesday night that the Department of Justice’s charges amounted to an “try to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.”
“Everyone in America could see what was going to come back next,” McCarthy said in a social media post that also referenced Hunter Biden’s recent plea hearing on federal tax charges.
That expected plea agreement fell apart in court after the presiding judge grilled the federal government’s lawyers about how the deal related to a separate gun charge against Biden. The president’s son pleaded not guilty pending the approval of a revised plea deal.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., accused the Justice Department of “cutting sweetheart deals for Hunter” while concurrently “attempting to persecute his leading political opponent.”
House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik of Recent York claimed Tuesday that Trump’s third indictment was “yet one more desperate try to distract attention away from the mounting evidence of Joe Biden’s direct involvement in his family’s illegal influence peddling scheme.”
Democrats and the White House strongly reject Republicans’ allegations of wrongdoing by the president.
White House spokesman Ian Sams posted that Archer “appears to have actually testified that President Biden wasn’t involved and didn’t discuss their business dealings. Yet the House Republicans – all the way in which as much as the Speaker himself – have decided to simply lie their way through it.”
A Washington Post evaluation published Tuesday, meanwhile, found that “so far, there was no evidence tying Joe Biden to Hunter Biden’s work in any concrete way.”
As they did following his first federal indictment in June, Trump’s defenders attacked Smith and questioned his credibility.
“Jack Smith is a terrible attorney with a whole lot of failures in his profession. Now, he’s abusing his power, the ability of the special counsel, and the ability of the Department of Injustice,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wrote on social media.
“Jack Smith is a rogue prosecutor with an axe to grind [against] President Trump,” posted Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed the special counsel in November with the aim of maintaining independence in multiple Trump-centered criminal probes, said Tuesday that Smith and his “principled” team “have followed the facts and the law wherever they lead.”
Other supporters of the previous president, including his defense lawyer within the case, have accused the DOJ of attempting to criminalize the previous president’s free speech right to query the 2020 election results.
“This potentially criminalizes many sorts of actions and statements by a President that a prosecutor deems to be false,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote. “You do not have to be a defender of Donald Trump to fret about where this may lead.”
Smith’s 45-page indictment acknowledges that Trump was legally allowed to air his false claims of election fraud and even challenge the outcomes through lawful means.
But Trump “also pursued illegal technique of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results,” prosecutors alleged.
Trump was already facing criminal charges in two separate cases. He has pleaded not guilty to Manhattan prosecutors’ charges of falsifying business records, in addition to to federal charges related to his retention of classified records after leaving the presidency in 2021.
Trump has been summoned to look in federal court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday afternoon, the DOJ said.
As Trump’s legal peril mounts, so does his standing in polls of the 2024 Republican presidential primary race.
“Thanks to everyone!!!” Trump said in an all-caps post on Truth Social on Wednesday morning. “I even have never had a lot support on anything before.”
