Former President Donald Trump said he will continue his 2024 run for the White House even if he is federally convicted on 37-counts relating to his handling of classified documents.
“I’ll never leave,” Trump told Politico on Saturday in an interview on his private plane. “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 indictment itself nor a conviction would legally prevent Trump, 76, from running for or winning the presidency in 2024. The ex-president could appear on the ballot from prison.
Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing and slammed the indictment as a politically motivated “witch hunt,” told the outlet that he does not expect to be convicted and that he does not plan on taking a plea deal unless there is a scenario “where they pay me some damages.”
When asked about the prospect of pardoning himself should he win the White House again, he said: “I don’t think I’ll ever have to. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The 49-page indictment against former President Donald Trump was unsealed in Miami on Friday, making it his second indictment in as many months and marks the first time in US history a former president has faced federal charges.
The charges, which include 31 counts of willful retention of national defense documents and conspiring to obstruct justice, follow Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s April indictment for Trump’s alleged falsification of business records.
An undeterred Trump spoke out publicly for the first time about the federal indictment at two separate campaign events on Saturday in Georgia and North Carolina.
During two separate 90-minute speeches, he raged against the “corrupt” Department of Justice and Biden administration and called the “baseless” indictment a form of “election interference” and a “demented persecution.”
“If I wasn’t leading in the polls we’d have no difficulty” [with indictments], Trump told a crowd of hundreds of supporters at the North Carolina GOP state convention in Greensboro.
“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,” he said of the Justice Department’s case, also likening it to abuses of power seen in “third-world countries.”
“These people have reached a level of Trump derangement syndrome that nobody thought was possible,” the former president continued.
The FBI seized troves of documents that were allegedly unlawfully kept at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate in August.
Investigators found boxes containing the documents throughout the property, including “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,” according to the indictment.
All 37 charges against him carry sentences ranging from 5 to 20 years.
