A large number of Republican Party officials considered this Thursday that the impeachment of former US President Donald Trump (2017-2021) is a “witch hunt” and warned that the US population “will not tolerate it”.
“The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold (Prosecutor) Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said.
For the conservative legislator, the prosecutor “has irreparably damaged the country in an attempt to interfere in the presidential election.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally and involved in another of the former president’s legal cases – the attempt to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia – also criticized the accusation.
Graham, who had a telephone conversation with Trump after the news broke, assured in an interview collected by The Washington Post that the former president told him that “they are using the law as a weapon”, something with which the senator was of agreement.
However, he distanced himself from the idea of ??calling protests for the accusation, something that the former president himself did a little over a week ago when he advanced that he expected to be arrested.
The chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, agreed that this is a politically motivated decision.
“When our justice system is used as a political tool it puts us all in danger. This is a flagrant abuse of power by a district attorney focused on political vendetta instead of keeping people safe,” he said. On twitter.
For the conservative legislator Jim Jordan, president of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, what happened is simply “scandalous”, as he published on that same social network.
The president of the conservative political action conference CPAC, Matt Schlapp, called the New York prosecutor’s decision an “abuse of power.”
“The persecution and the new impeachment of President Trump is an outrageous violation of constitutional norms and a continuation of an insane political persecution,” Schlapp wrote in a statement.
The one who has not commented on the news at the moment is the leader of the conservatives in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the main figure in opposition to Trump within the Republican Party and a frequent object of criticism of the former president.
The Democrats, for their part, insisted that “no one is above the law,” as Congressman Jamaal Bowman said in a statement.
Being accused of falsifying business records, in his opinion, “is only the beginning of accountability for his crimes”; among them, “attempting to illegally reverse the results of the elections in Georgia and inciting the insurrection of the Capitol, both in an effort to overthrow the Government to advance their fascist cause.”
Senate President Chuck Schumer called for political interference or intimidation to be avoided in the case, recalling that the former Republican president is subject “to the same laws as any American,” according to a statement from his office. .
The press secretary of the Democratic National Committee, Ammar Moussa, also criticized that regardless of what happens in the upcoming legal proceedings, the party remains “under the control” of Trump and the MAGA, an acronym for the slogan “Make America Great Again”. (Make America Great Again) that the former president used in his first electoral campaign and with which his faithful are known.
“We will continue to hold Trump and all Republican candidates accountable for the MAGA-leaning extremist agenda that includes banning abortion, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and undermining free and fair elections,” he added in a statement.
Trump was indicted Thursday by a grand jury for paying to silence porn actress Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. This is the first criminal indictment against a former US president.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project