President Trump spoke from his Mar-a-Lago home on Tuesday, the evening after he was arrested in New York and charged with 34 counts of felony falsification of business documents charges in the first degree. Trump submitted a plea of not guilty.
Crowds gathered in the ballroom, the same room where Trump had announced his run for president on November 14, 2022. In November, everyone knew what to expect, but now nearly five months later, it was hard to imagine what to expect.
Trump was introduced as the “next president of the United States,” to the wild cheers of supporters. Trump spoke with specifics about the case, and about the petty Democrat machine that has been coming after him for years, including New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump walked through the crowd to the familiar sounds of his God Bless the USA as supporters cheered for the man who is running for president despite a politically motivated prosecution.
Trump seemed entirely unruffled by the back-and-forth between New York and Florida on Tuesday, calling for the case against him to be dropped.
“The only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it,” he said.
“Everybody, even people that aren’t big fans have said it. They said this is not the right thing to do. It’s an insult to our country as the world is already laughing at us for so many other reasons.” He listed Biden’s border crises, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal that took the likes of 13 servicemembers, and the decline of the enrgy independence Trump worked so hard to ensure during his term in office.
He further spoke about the other politically motivated cases being levied against him by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, which had authorized a raid of his home in August. At that time, they confiscated confidential classified documents.
Trump stated what many believe, which is that Bragg’s prosecution of him is what constitutes election interference, saying “…and now this massive election interference at a scale never seen before in this country, beginning with the radical left George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg of New York.”
“This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election, and it should be dropped immediately,” he said.
“Now they have really stepped up their efforts by indicting the 45th President of the United States,” he said, “who received 75 million votes which is more than any sitting president in the history of our country.” He called out other big city prosecutors, including the DA in Atlanta, who are attempting to bring charges.
“If you took the 5 worst presidents in the history of the United States and added them up,” Trump said, “they would not have done near the destruction to our country as Joe Biden and the Biden administration have done.”
And he promised to “Make America Great Again.”
The speaking event was scheduled to be a response to the indictment by New York City DA Alvin Bragg, who ran his district attorney campaign on a platform of getting Trump on one charge or another.
While falsification of business documents is only a misdemeanor infraction, Bragg upped it to a felony with the claim that Trump’s alleged improper classification of payments made to his attorney over some 9 months in 2017 as legal fees was the basis for a second crime. That second crime, for Bragg, was an illegal campaign contribution.
His intent is to prove that Trump intended to help his campaign by falsifying business documents, i.e. classifying payments made to his attorney as legal fees, when per Bragg the monies were used to convince a porn star not to say that she and Trump were engaged in a one-night romantic interlude.
Trump faces 136 years in prison if he’s convicted on all charges. A judge instructed Trump and the prosecution to “refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence and civil unrest.”
The White House has had nothing to say about the indictment, despite this being the first time in American history that a current or previous president has been indicted on criminal charges.
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