Noted anti-Trump former GOP Rep. Justin Amash, now a Libertarian, blasted the indictment of former President Donald Trump on Tuesday, saying he couldn't believe any prosecutor would go forward with such weak charges.
“After reading DA Bragg’s indictment of Trump and accompanying statement of facts, I’m stunned any prosecutor would move forward with this. It’s even flimsier than we were led to believe. Thirty-four stacked counts, bootstrapped to an unstated crime, to manufacture felony charges,” Amash tweeted.
After reading DA Bragg’s indictment of Trump and accompanying statement of facts, I’m stunned any prosecutor would move forward with this. It’s even flimsier than we were led to believe. Thirty-four stacked counts, bootstrapped to an unstated crime, to manufacture felony charges.
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) April 4, 2023
Amash was the first Republican to say that Trump should have been impeached over the Mueller Report, saying it showed "underlying crimes."
He was a founder of the Freedom Caucus but left that group in 2019 because it continued to support Trump amid various allegations.
Despite his support for impeachment and belief that Trump engaged in wrongdoing, however, Amash does not agree with the way Bragg structured the indictment.
The problem Bragg will have in prosecuting Trump is that the charges he chose to pursue, 34 counts of falsifying business records, are supposed to be a misdemeanor at the state level with a two-year statute of limitations. He had to tie the counts to another crime, which he chose not to specify, in order to make it a felony and bypass the two-year limit.
Trump pled not guilty to the charges on Tuesday and has hired top New York lawyer Todd Blanche to represent him.
“He’s frustrated, he’s upset, but I’ll tell you what: he’s motivated,” Blanche told reporters outside the courthouse. “[It’s] a political prosecution. The indictment itself is boilerplate.”
Trump was not put under a gag order by the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, and he made a statement from Mar-A-Lago saying that the indictment was a "fake case" brought "only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election."
It should be "dropped immediately," he added, saying, "I never thought anything like this could happen in America."
The timing of the indictment, just as House Republicans begin to uncover misconduct by President Joe Biden regarding financial and business dealings his family made that appear to have leveraged his position as vice president and president, is suspicious.
The media already tries its best to ignore any negative news about Biden, and the Trump indictment gives them plenty of material to highlight in order to justify covering up the GOP's investigations of Biden and other Democrats.
