‘Politically Charged Prosecution’: Republicans Blast Trump’s Looming Indictment

Republicans are rallying around former President Donald Trump in the face of his looming indictment—with even some of Trump’s fiercest GOP critics and 2024 rivals warning that it could benefit him.

The most notable comments came from former Vice President Mike Pence, who will likely challenge Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.

“It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here. And I, for my part, I just feel like it's just not what the American people want to see,” Pence told ABC News.

That remark is especially notable given that Pence has recently ramped up criticism of his old boss for putting his life at risk during the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

But Pence’s calculation that the GOP base would be furious about the indictment—and he better act like he is, too—was par for the course after Trump claimed that he would be arrested on Tuesday and called for his supporters to “Protest, take our nation back!” in a weekend social media post.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s highest-polling 2024 opponent, took the opportunity to criticize Trump’s past behavior—but ridiculed the potential indictment.

“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. 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, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush money payments that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office,” he said Monday morning.

New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who is weighing a presidential bid, told CNN that the looming indictment is “building a lot of sympathy for the former president.”

“I just think that not just the media, but really, a lot of the Democrats have misplayed this in terms of building sympathy for the former president and it does drastically change the paradigm as we go into the 2024 election,” he said.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has endorsed Trump’s 2024 bid, said “The prosecutor in New York has done more to help Donald Trump get elected president than any single person in America today.”

And former Michigan Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, who lost his primary last year after he was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, warned that the indictment would be a “a billion dollar gift-in-kind from Democrats to Trump’s ‘24 campaign.”

Trump is facing possible indictments in three different cases, but the one that seems to be most likely to be charged in the coming days is in New York, where Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is looking at charging him for making hush-money payments to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels about an alleged affair ahead of the 2016 election, which he may have violated the law by not disclosing on his campaign finance records.

Trump’s claim that the arrest would come Tuesday doesn’t seem to be based on any specific information—but it appears that his indictment is imminent.

Other Trump allies fumed as well.

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, issued a statement calling the looming charges “unAmerican” (sic.) and describing it as “the continuation of this disgraceful and unconstitutional pattern going back to the illegal Russian collusion hoax.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted that an indictment would be “an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” and said the House should investigate whether any federal funds were being used for this and other “politically motivated prosecutions.”

McCarthy split with Trump later on, however, saying Trump’s backers shouldn’t protest because of possible violence.

“I don’t think people should protest this, no. And I think President Trump, if you talk to him, he doesn’t believe that, either,” McCarthy said Sunday.

“Nobody should harm one another,” he followed up. “We want calmness out there.”