Former president Donald Trump says he expects be arrested on charges stemming from alleged hush-money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels about an affair she says they had years earlier. Trump, who has denied the affair, is calling on his supporters to protest what he says is his imminent arrest. Alvin Bragg (D), the Manhattan district attorney, has not confirmed any plans to arrest Trump, but Republican leaders have criticized the case.
Some quickly defended Trump. Others — like Nikki Haley, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) — have stayed quiet.
Here is what Republicans have said about a possible indictment of Trump.
“Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said at a news conference on Monday. “I can’t speak to that.”
“But what I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction and he chooses to go back many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush-money payments, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda.”
He went on to say, “We are not involved in this, won’t be involved in this. I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros D.A.,” referring to one of the Manhattan district attorney’s campaign supporters, George Soros. Soros is a frequent target of baseless right-wing accusations rooted in antisemitism.
“I don’t think people should protest this, no.” McCarthy said Sunday. He added: “And I think President Trump, if you talk to him, he doesn’t believe that, either.”
McCarthy also criticized the case against Trump, saying to reporters, “We need equal justice in America,” and “Do you believe this is equal justice? Are you proud of what the Manhattan D.A. is doing?”
“This is unAmerican and the radical Left has reached a dangerous new low of Third World countries,” she said in a statement, the Daily Gazette reported. “Knowing they cannot beat President Trump at the ballot box, the Radical Left will now follow the lead of Socialist dictators and reportedly arrest President Trump, the leading Republican candidate for President of the United States.”
Bragg “got pressured, I think from the left,” Jordan told Fox News on Monday. He went on to say, “Now they’re coming after him for some alleged bookkeeping error. You’ve got to be kidding me.” The House Judiciary Committee, which Jordan chairs, is demanding Bragg testify in Congress about this probe, plus provide a trove of documents about it.
On Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Comer said, “It’s very odd that this would come out the just the very next day after I revealed bank records which showed that the Biden family, the president in particular, hasn’t been truthful with respect to his family receiving payments directly from the Chinese Community Party.”
He went on to say that it “almost looks like an effort” to distract from that.
“I think it just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country. It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here,” Pence said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
“I think it’s building a lot of sympathy for the former president,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union.” Sununu said he met recently with “some folks, and they’re — none of them were big Trump supporters, but they all said they felt like he was being attacked.”
On ABC’s “This Week” Christie said it can be true that the Manhattan district attorney is unfairly prosecuting Trump, and “that Donald Trump is not someone who could be a winning general election candidate for the Republican Party because of all these things.”
Over the weekend he said, “It is a sad day in America, it is dark day in America if you have the ruling party in this country using police power to arrest its political opposition. That would be the beginning of the end as we know it.”
“I think this is one of the worst uses of the justice system we’ve ever seen,” Donalds said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Donalds also said, “It’s going to descend all of America into further chaos.”
“We have got to start standing up for justice,” he said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Scott also said, “Stand up. I don’t care whether you like Trump or don’t like Trump. There can’t be a different standard” of justice.
Trump “used his own money to resolve a private dispute, irrespective of any campaign,” he posted to Twitter on Saturday. “This is an absurd abuse of the criminal process in our politics.”
Marianna Sotomayor, Lori Rozsa and Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.