Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is not going to focus on Donald Trump’s legal woes, co-chair Cedric Richmond said Sunday, as the president continues to refrain from talking directly about his predecessor’s four criminal indictments.
“The president has said from the beginning that he wanted an independent Justice Department and we have to do just that,” Richmond, who previously served as a top aide to Biden in the White House, said in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.” “So we’re not going to comment, we’re not going to focus on Donald Trump’s legal problems.”
Biden has taken shots at Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, over a number of issues in recent months as well as his Make America Great Again agenda, but the president has stayed mum on discussing the four separate indictments against the former president that has plagued the early race for the White House.
As the former president traveled to the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday night to surrender on charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in the battleground state, Biden posted a link to donate to his campaign on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Apropos of nothing, I think today’s a great day to give to my campaign,” he wrote in the post.
Richmond insisted that Biden wasn’t referencing the indictment in that fundraising post: “No, those emails go out — you get five and six of them a day — so I wouldn’t read much into that.”
In separate cases, special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump earlier this month on charges he conspired to defraud the country he used to lead and attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power to Biden, and in June over his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office.
Trump was also indicted this month, along with 18 co-defendants, on felony charges in connection with alleged efforts to overturn the results of 2020 election in Georgia. The fourth indictment against Trump came months after he became the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges when a grand jury in New York City voted to indict him in March in a case centered on hush money payments made toward the end of his 2016 campaign.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in the hush money, classified documents and election conspiracy cases. While his arraignment for the Georgia case, which will allow him to enter a plea, has not yet been scheduled, Trump has vehemently denied any wrongdoing in statements to the public in all four cases.
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The former president declined to participate in last week’s first Republican primary presidential debate, during which the GOP field of candidates were asked whether they would still support Trump as the GOP nominee even he is convicted of felonies.
Most of the candidates on stage, with the exception of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, raised their hands in support of Trump.
Christie, a former Trump ally who broke with the former president following his baseless claims of widespread election fraud, said it was “amazing” that most of his Republican rivals said they would support Trump as the eventual nominee in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“It was really the most amazing part of the debate to me, was the idea that you know, the majority of my competitors believe that you can have a convicted felon as our nominee for president and that they’d support that and that he could win,” Christie said. “I think that’s an impossibility.”
Hutchinson, who is also a frequent critic of Trump, echoed Christie, saying he was “surprised” so many GOP candidates would still support the former president.
“Well, I was surprised. It was a very clear question as to whether we would support Donald Trump if he’s convicted of serious felonies. And I was the only one that … said very clearly that I would not support him,” Hutchinson said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I was surprised at that. That didn’t seem to be a difficult question to me.”
Meanwhile, an attorney for Trump denied that his team has concerns over the mounting criminal charges against him, which they have dismissed as a political hit job.
“We’re not concerned because we know the facts of these cases, which I can’t get into obviously for privileged reasons,” Alina Habba said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “But I can tell you that it’s to tie him up, it’s definitely political.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
