Leading Republican candidate Donald J. Trump had an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Thursday night regarding Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictments and investigation into him. Mr. Trump also responded to Smith’s decision to bring additional charges against the former president in the indictment over possession of documents. Trump insisted he was innocent of the charges and that Smith was clearly weaponizing the Justice Department. “This is harassment,” declared the former president.
The interview began with Trump informing his host that he had just heard about Smith’s decision to supersede the indictment and charge a third defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, with obstruction by alleging that Trump conspired with De Oliveira and others to delete Mar-a-Lago’s security footage in the summer of 2022. Trump said “I just heard it as I’m sitting down. This is harassment. This is election interference.”
He explained, “I’m protected by the Presidential Records Act totally. It shouldn’t even be a case. It’s not a criminal case. Where’s Biden with all the documents? He’s got 20 times, 30 times the documents I have, and he has not made it easy for them either. He has been hiding boxes. They’re sending boxes to Chinatown. Boxes are being sent to Chinatown, and yet China is paying them millions of dollars. You explain that one. You don’t even hear about it. All you hear about is Trump.”
Mr. Trump then observed that “No, this is a two-tier system of injustice. That’s what we have. We have a sick country. Our country is very sick right now. We have a failing nation and it’s a very sad thing to watch.”
Trump also commented during the interview that if re-elected, he would fire Jack Smith and noted the man’s bad record. “I wouldn’t keep him…Jack Smith? Why would I keep him? He is—look, he’s gone after other people. He’s been overturned unanimously in the Supreme Court. He’s destroyed a lot of lives. Lives have been destroyed. He’s destroyed people—he’s destroyed lives… He was Lois Lerner and the IRS case, which was one of the most egregious abuses that happened. The government had to apologize to people,” Trump told the interviewer.
Mr. Trump added that Mr. Smith “went after Christians. This is a guy—he’s a wild man. I call him deranged. He’s been overturned. He went after the governor of Virginia—overturned unanimously. He went after another senator or something and was overturned. What he’s done is just horrible. The abuse of power—it is prosecutorial misconduct.”
Trump responded to a question of how history will look upon this moment by saying it would be remembered as an “embarrassment”. Mr. Trump expressed confidence that the public was able to see through the charges and cited polling as evidence they were. “They [the Department of Justice] did this in order to get me out [of the election]. It’s incredible, because the public gets it and it had the opposite impact” declared Trump.