OAN’s Brooke Mallory
1:39 PM – Sunday, June 11, 2023
Former President Donald Trump says he will run for president again in 2024, even if he is convicted on the 37-counts related to his alleged handling of confidential materials.
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“I’ll never leave,” Trump said on Saturday in a Politico interview. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016. That was a rough one. In theory that was not doable.”
Neither the charges nor a conviction would bar Trump, 76, from competing or winning the presidency in 2024. Even if Trump was behind bars, the former president could still appear on the ballot.
Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing and branded the indictment as a politically driven “witch hunt,” told the press that he does not anticipate to be convicted and will not accept a plea offer until there is a scenario “where they pay me some damages.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever have to. I didn’t do anything wrong,” he maintained.
Former President Donald Trump’s 49-page indictment was released on Friday, marking this as his second indictment and the first time in U.S. history that a former president has faced criminal charges.
The allegations, which include 31 counts of deliberate retention of national security documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice, come on the heels of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s April indictment of Trump for alleged business record falsification.
At two separate campaign events on Saturday in Georgia and North Carolina, an unfazed and confident Trump spoke out publicly for the first time on the federal indictment.
He shouted against the “corrupt Department of Justice” and the Biden administration in two separate 90-minute addresses, calling the “baseless” indictment a form of “election interference” and “demented persecution.”
“If I wasn’t leading in the polls we’d have no difficulty” [with indictments], Trump said to hundreds of his supporters and fans at the North Carolina GOP state convention.
“We’ve got 5,000 prosecutors after us because they don’t want to run against Trump,” he said. “This is more like Stalinst Russia or communist China… These people have reached a level of Trump derangement syndrome that nobody thought was possible,” Trump continued.
In August, the FBI purportedly confiscated troves of papers illegally stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
The records were discovered in boxes around the house, including “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,” the indictment noted.
Current President Joe Biden was also caught storing classified documents containing sensitive information at his residence and office, but he has received no legal consequences so far, unlike Trump.
The former president recently posted his polling numbers on Truth Social, his social media platform.
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