“Need one more indictment to close out this election”: Donald Trump

Alabama [US]: Hitting out at the Biden administration, former United States President Donald Trump on Friday said that he wears the indictments as a “badge of honour” and he needs just one more to “close out” the upcoming presidential elections, New York Post reported.

He was delivering a speech at the annual Alabama GOP dinner in Montgomery on Friday.
Trump said that the growing list of charges he faces has only helped his campaign and said he considers each indictment a “truly great badge of honour.”

“It’s not going to make any impact, because every time they file an indictment we go way up in the polls,” New York Post quoted Trump, the front-running Republican presidential candidate, saying to the crowd.

“We need one more indictment to close out this election,” he joked, to cheers. “One more indictment and this election is closed out, nobody has even a chance.”

Trump has been indicted three times since March. The latest charges, filed Tuesday after an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, accuse Trump of knowingly spreading false information about widespread voter fraud after he lost the 2020 election to President Biden.

Trump told the crowd Friday that he referred to the indictments as “a badge of honour” because he is “being indicted for you.”

“So, thanks a lot,” he said.

Slamming the Biden government further, Trump called the Justice Department “corrupt”, saying charges could have been filed against him years ago, but instead “they waited right until the middle of the election”.

“They waited until I became the dominant force in the polls because we’re dominating everyone, including Biden, in the polls. And then they filed them all, everyone, one of them, at the same time,” New York Post quoted Trump as saying.

The former President blasted the trio of indictments as “election interference” and called the latest case “an outrageous criminalization of political speech.”

“This ridiculous indictment against us, it’s not a legal case — it’s an act of desperation by a failed and disgraced Joe Biden and his radical thugs,” Trump said.

“The reason this is happening is simple: Joe Biden is the most incompetent and at the same time the most corrupt president in the history of the United States,” the New York Post quoted Trump as saying.

“Every time more Biden corruption is exposed his henchmen indict me because they want to knock out the bad publicity,” he said, calling it a “cover-up” for the “Biden crime family.”
Earlier in the day, Trump posted on his Truth Social a vague warning: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU.”

However, he had reportedly been warned not to issue threats by the judge during Thursday’s arraignment, as per New York Post.

Earlier on Friday, Trump also pleaded not guilty to the new charges special counsel Jack Smith brought against him in the case alleging mishandling of classified documents from his time in the White House, CNN reported.

The filing marked the second time in 24 hours that the former president entered a ‘not guilty’ plea, following his arraignment Thursday in the special counsel’s separate investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.