{"id":569634,"date":"2023-04-10T15:04:29","date_gmt":"2023-04-10T12:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/trumps-response-to-criminal-charges-revives-election-lies\/"},"modified":"2023-04-10T15:04:29","modified_gmt":"2023-04-10T12:04:29","slug":"trumps-response-to-criminal-charges-revives-election-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/trumps-response-to-criminal-charges-revives-election-lies\/","title":{"rendered":"#Trump’s response to criminal charges revives election lies"},"content":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Legally, the most important words former President Donald Trump<\/a> said after he was charged with 34 felonies by the Manhattan District Attorney last week were \u201cnot guilty.\u201d But, politically, the most significant may be \u201celection interference.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s repetition of those words, which have been taken up by other top Republicans, show how he is trying to turn his historic position as the first former president charged with crimes to his advantage. It’s another example of what’s been a consistent refrain throughout his political career \u2014 claiming without evidence that an election is being rigged against him.<\/p>\n

After his initial court appearance in the New York case<\/a>, the first of several in which he is in legal jeopardy, Trump ticked through the varied investigations he was facing and branded them as \u201cmassive\u201d attempts to interfere with the 2024 election.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur justice system has become lawless,” Trump said as he app<\/a>eared before supporters at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. “They\u2019re using it now, in addition to everything else, to win elections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has made some version of those claims in at least 20 social media<\/a> posts since March 3, the bulk of which occurred in the last two weeks, accelerating when a Manhattan grand jury appeared to be wrapping up its work and preparing to indict the former president. Trump declared his latest bid for the White House shortly after the November midterms, in what some in his orbit saw as an effort to head off the various probes swirling around him.<\/p>\n

Alleging an election is being stolen from him is a routine Trump tactic, despite no evidence to back up his assertions. When competing for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, Trump claimed his loss in the Iowa caucuses<\/a> was due to fraud. When he won the White House that November but lost the popular vote, Trump claimed the only reason for falling short in the latter category was because undocumented immigrants voted. A task force he formed to find voter fraud disbanded without finding any evidence<\/a> to back up his claim.<\/p>\n

In 2020, Trump began arguing the election would be fraudulent months before voting started. He attacked efforts to loosen restrictions on mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, and expanded those allegations after losing the election to claim he’d actually won it. Those lies led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Federal and state election officials and Trump\u2019s own attorney general<\/a> have said there is no credible evidence the 2020 election was tainted. The former president\u2019s allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by courts, including by judges Trump appointed.<\/p>\n

Trump is behaving like a politician in the legal crosshairs, said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe’s certainly not the first politician to be prosecuted \u2014 sometimes fairly, sometimes not \u2014 to play the political victim card,\u201d Levitsky said.<\/p>\n

Levitsky, who cowrote the book \u201cHow Democracies Die,\u201d said that several former presidents of other countries, when prosecuted, have claimed it was a plot to foil their future elections. Most recently, that was the complaint of Brazil’s former president Luis In\u00e1cio Lula Da Silva<\/a> after he was jailed before the 2018 election. Silva was freed by his country’s supreme court and won back the presidency in October.<\/p>\n

What’s notable in Trump’s case, however, is that his own party is echoing the stolen election claims ahead of the next campaign. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last month said he was directing his party’s committee chairs to \u201cinvestigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat a whole party is carrying this line is somewhat unusual,” Levitsky said.<\/p>\n

Last week’s charges in New York<\/a> court stemmed from Trump’s reimbursements to his lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, of hush money paid in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who alleged they had an affair. Even some critics of Trump have seen the charges as a stretch of New York laws<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The heart of the Manhattan case is prosecutors’ claim that Trump falsified business records at his company to make the payoff in order to keep a potentially damaging story quiet while he was campaigning \u2014 an illegal attempt by Trump, they argued, to try to influence the election.<\/p>\n

The former president also faces legal jeopardy from other investigations, two of which are related to his attempts to try to interfere with the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are probing Trump’s January 2021 call to the state’s top elections officer asking him to \u201cfind\u201d enough votes to declare Trump the winner there. The U.S. Justice Department also has launched a federal special counsel probe into Trump’s attempts to try to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election.<\/p>\n

Trump is also enmeshed in a federal special counsel investigation of his handling of classified documents found at his Florida estate.<\/p>\n

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg<\/a>, when asked at a news<\/a> conference on Tuesday whether the timing of the case was political, responded by saying: \u201cI bring cases when they\u2019re ready.”<\/p>\n

Bragg\u2019s office declined to comment on Trump\u2019s statements about \u201celection interference,” as did the Department of Justice.<\/p>\n

Critics warn that Trump is, once again, sowing suspicions of fraud that could damage democracy. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen this film before,\u201d Joanna Lydgate, chief executive officer of States United Action, which tracks politicians who embrace Trump’s election lies, said in a statement. \u201cWe know this is dangerous because we all saw what happened on January 6th.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has routinely waved off such warnings, and has seamlessly integrated his current legal jeopardy into the false allegations he\u2019s made for three years about Democratic Party wrongdoing leading to his ouster.<\/p>\n

In his first campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, days before the Manhattan indictment, Trump railed against all the investigations and said that his opponents were using the probes \u201cbecause it\u2019s harder for them to stuff the ballot boxes, of which they stuffed plenty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new weapon being used by out-of-control unhinged Democrats to cheat on election is criminally investigating a candidate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Trump and other Republicans have sometimes contradicted themselves, decrying the investigations as an attempt to tarnish Trump while also predicting they’ll aid his bid for the White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you\u2019ll see his poll numbers go up,\u201d Rep. Elise Stefanik<\/a>, R-N.Y., one of the president’s most vocal backers in the House, predicated at a GOP conference last month. \u201cHe\u2019s never been in a stronger position.\u201d She condemned the charges last week as \u201cunprecedented election interference.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, which has long been critical of Trump’s allegations of election rigging, noted that all the investigations of the former president began well before he started running for president again.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody is above the law, including former presidents, and running for president cannot and must not serve as a shield for wrongful conduct,\u201d Scherb said.<\/p>\n

___ Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

Originally published <\/span>

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NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Legally, the most important words former President Donald Trump said after he was charged with 34 felonies by the Manhattan District Attorney last week were \u201cnot guilty.\u201d But, politically, the most significant may be \u201celection interference.\u201d Trump\u2019s repetition of those words, which have been taken up by other top Republicans, show…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":569635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/ny\/api\/res\/1.2\/88rrsnLZK2er4al3RZxbwQ--\/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyMDA7aD04MDE-\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/ap.org\/fdde61cd4e6695430c15311c134bcb75","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}