Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is strongly condemning a New York Grand Jury’s indictment of former President Donald Trump, calling it a “dark moment in American history.”
Thursday’s indictment follows a years-long investigation of Trump in connection with a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels who claims to have had an affair with Trump years ago. The payment was made in advance of the 2016 presidential election. Trump has denied the affair.
Many legal experts have said the falsifying business records case, typically a misdemeanor in New York, is weak at best, particularly because partisan Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, has insisted on elevating the charge to a felony.
Trump is the first former president to be charged with a crime, and critics say the case is politically driven by Democrats’ animus for Trump, who announced his presidential campaign shortly after last November’s mid-term elections.
“The politically motivated indictment of the 45th President of the United States marks a dark moment in American history. It will undermine public trust in our electoral system & justice system,” Ramaswamy said Thursday afternoon in a tweet. “It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals. Principles go beyond partisanship. Let the American people decide who governs.”
The politically motivated indictment of the 45th President of the United States marks a dark moment in American history. It will undermine public trust in our electoral system & justice system. It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political… pic.twitter.com/BFcSlJ0OWO
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 30, 2023
The Ohio entrepreneur and political outsider on Thursday was the first declared or presumptive GOP presidential candidate to come out against the indictment, as he was nearly two weeks ago when Trump predicted that he would soon be arrested.
At the time Ramaswamy said, “If a Republican prosecutor in 2004 had used a campaign finance technicality to arrest then-candidate John Kerry while Bush & Cheney were in power, liberals would have cried foul – and rightly so.”
In that tweet, Ramaswamy called on the district attorney to reconsider and to “put aside partisan politics in service of preserving our Constitutional republic.”
Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is considering a run for president, did send out a fundraising appeal late Thursday attacking “George Soros-funded” Bragg. He did not mention his former boss’ name.
“George Soros-funded District Attorneys like the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg undermine America’s confidence in our legal system. Bragg is the same Soros-funded prosecutor who refuses to prosecute violent crimes and has downgraded more than half of all felonies to misdemeanors,” Pompeo said in the email to potential donors. “Prosecuting serious crimes keeps Americans safe, but political prosecutions put the American legal system at risk of being viewed as a tool for abuse.
“DA Bragg – spend taxpayers’ money and your energy protecting law-abiding citizens and not playing politics.”
As CNBC reports, the charge stems from the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into how the Trump Organization recorded a reimbursement to Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen after Cohen paid Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006.
Cohen, who served time in prison on tax evasion and campaign-finance violations, is said to be the prosecution’s star witness.
Trump declared the indictment “Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history.
“The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable — indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference,” the former president said in a statement.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Vivek Ramaswamy” by Vivek Ramaswamy.
