Biden campaign won’t ‘focus on Trump’s legal issues,’ co-chair says

Joe Biden’s re-election campaign will not focus on Donald Trump’s legal woes, Co-Chair Cedric Richmond said on Sunday, as the president continues to refrain from speaking directly about his predecessor’s four criminal indictments.

“The president has said from the start that he wants an independent Justice Department and that’s exactly what we need to do,” said Richmond, who previously served as a top aide to Biden in the White House. , in an interview on ABC News. Week.” “So we’re not going to comment, we’re not going to focus on Donald Trump’s legal issues.”

Biden has fired on Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, on a number of issues in recent months as well as his Make America Great Again agenda, but the president has remained silent on the discussion of the four indictments. separates against the former president who plagued the first race for the White House.

As the former president traveled to Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday night to surrender on charges related to his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election 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 is a great day for my campaign. » he wrote in the post.

Richmond insisted that Biden did not refer to the indictment in this fundraising message: “No, these emails are sent – ​​you get five or six a day – so I wouldn’t read them. not much. »

In separate cases, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump earlier this month for conspiring to defraud the country he led and attempting to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power to Biden, and in June for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office.

Trump was also indicted this month, along with 18 co-defendants, of crimes related to alleged attempts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. The fourth indictment against Trump came months after he became the first former US president to face criminal charges when a New York grand jury voted to indict him in March in a case centered on payments hidden money made towards the end of his 2016 campaign.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to the silence, classified documents and election conspiracy cases. Although his impeachment in the Georgia case, which will allow him to plead guilty, has yet to be scheduled, Trump has vehemently denied any wrongdoing in his public statements in all four cases.

The former president declined to take part in the first Republican presidential debate last week, in which Republican candidates were asked whether they would still support Trump as a Republican nominee, even if he were convicted of crimes.

Most of the candidates on stage, with the exception of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, raised their hands in support of Trump.

Christie, a former Trump ally who broke with the former president over his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, said it was “astonishing” that most of his Republican rivals said they would support Trump in as a potential contestant in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” ” on Sunday.

“That was really the most amazing part of the debate for me was the idea that you know, the majority of my competitors believe that you can have a convicted felon as your presidential candidate and they would support that and that he could win,” Christie said. “I think it’s an impossibility.”

Hutchinson, who is also a frequent critic of Trump, echoed Christie, saying he was “surprised” that so many Republican candidates still support the former president.

“Well, I was surprised. The question was very clear whether we would support Donald Trump if he were found guilty of serious crimes. And I was the only one who made it very clear that I wouldn’t support it,” Hutchinson said Sunday in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I was surprised by it. It didn’t strike me as a difficult question.

Meanwhile, a lawyer for Trump has denied that his team is concerned about the mounting criminal charges against him, which they have called a political stunt.

“We are not worried because we know the facts of these cases, which I obviously cannot discuss for privileged reasons,” Alina Habba said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday”. Tying him up is definitely political.