CNN
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Republican presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson on Sunday articulated very different plans for how they would approach the federal indictment against former President Donald Trump should he capture the White House in 2024.
Candidates for the GOP nomination are scrambling to set the right tone for Trump, seen as the GOP favorite to take on President Joe Biden next year, as they seek to build support among Republican primary voters. .
Trump faces his first federal indictment for withholding classified documents and conspiring with a top aide to hide them from the government and his own lawyers — a total of 37 charges.
Ramaswamy, who promised to pardon Trump if elected president before details of the 37-count indictment were revealed, doubled down on Sunday, telling CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that after ” read this indictment and look at the selective omissions of both.” fact and right,” he was “even more convinced that pardon is the right answer here.”
Ramaswamy acknowledged that he “would not have taken these documents with me”, but the tech entrepreneur maintained that there was a difference between “bad judgment and breaking the law”.
Bash pressures Ramaswamy to commit to pardoning Trump
Those comments contrasted with Hutchinson, who called Ramaswamy’s vote to pardon Trump “simply wrong” in a separate interview on “State of the Union” later Sunday.
“It’s just wrong for a candidate to use the president’s US pardon power to get votes and get a line of applause. It’s wrong,” the former Arkansas governor told Bash.
“We don’t need our commander-in-chief in this country not protecting our nation’s secrets,” Hutchinson said, later adding, “These are things that should not be revealed for entertainment value to a political contact you are talking to.”
Asked if he thinks the impeachment will help Trump in the 2024 race, Hutchinson said, “I suspect he’s going to raise money from the impeachment like he did before. And obviously with a lot of Republican leaders saying that’s selective prosecution, that this is unfair, there is a sympathy factor that comes into play.”
But, Hutchinson said, “The Republican Party stands for the rule of law and our justice system. We don’t undermine that with our rhetoric, making up facts and accusing the Justice Department of things for which there is no evidence.”
Ramaswamy is not the only 2024 GOP candidate to criticize the Justice Department in the days since Trump first revealed the indictment.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday accused the DOJ of “weaponizing federal law enforcement” as he vowed, if elected president, to “bring accountability to the DOJ, eliminate political bias and end weaponry once and for all.”
DeSantis declined to comment on the allegation Saturday at a campaign stop in Oklahoma, but repeated his vow to end the “weaponization” of government and “clean house from top to bottom” as president.
Former Vice President Mike Pence called on Attorney General Merrick Garland on Saturday to “stop hiding behind the special counsel and come before the American people” to explain “this unprecedented action.”
“We also need to hear the former president’s defense so that each of us can make our own judgment,” Pence told attendees at the North Carolina Republican convention in Greensboro, where Trump also spoke hours after having spoken at a similar meeting in Georgia.
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, called the indictment “prosecutorial overreach” in a statement Friday, adding that it was time to move on “beyond drama and endless distractions.”
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who entered the GOP race last week, vowed in an interview with CBS News on Sunday that he would “follow all the rules related to handling classified documents” after he left the position as president. He told Fox News on Saturday that Trump’s mishandling of documents was not something voters want to spend their time talking about.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former ally and close adviser to Trump who has become his main critic in the 2024 race, however, called the details of the indictment “reprehensible.”
“This is irresponsible conduct,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday, adding that “the conduct that Donald Trump engaged in was completely self-inflicted.”
Christie is scheduled to participate in a CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper in New York on Monday.
Full interview: Dana Bash presses Rep. Jim Jordan on impeachment
Trump has maintained the reliable support of hard-liners in Congress, including House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who fiercely defended the former president in an interview with Bash on Sunday.
“The president’s ability to classify and control access to national security information comes from the Constitution,” the Ohio Republican said. “He alone decides. He said he declassified that material. You can put it wherever you want. He can do as he pleases.”
But the laws under which the Justice Department said it was investigating possible crimes: statutes on the willful withholding of national defense information, obstruction of a federal investigation and concealment or deletion of government records. no documents required be classified as having committed a crime, CNN previously reported.
Bash also reminded Jordan that Trump admitted on tape in a 2021 meeting to having a document that was not declassified, a detail first reported by CNN. But Jordan hit back repeatedly, claiming that saying Trump “could have” declassified material as president was not the same as saying he “didn’t” already declassify the material.
“He has said over and over again, he has declassified all of this material,” the congressman said.
Asked if he had evidence that Trump declassified any documents, Jordan said, “I’m going by the president’s word, and he said yes.”
