Former US President Trump slams criminal charges as ‘insult to our country’ in campaign-style speech
WASHINGTON,APR 5: Donald Trump offered a full-throated defense of his conduct Tuesday in his first public remarks since being charged over hush money payments to a porn star, blasting the criminal prosecution as “an insult to our country.”
Hours earlier the 76-year-old former US president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts in a dramatic hearing in New York that transfixed the nation — and began the countdown to the first-ever criminal trial of an American president.
Trump again protested his innocence and asserted on his Truth Social platform that the “hearing was shocking to many in that they had no ‘surprises,’ and therefore, no case.”
In his speech, Trump lashed out anew at the prosecution and attacked in bitter terms the prosecutor and the judge presiding over the case despite being admonished hours earlier about incendiary rhetoric. In a sign of that other probes are weighing on him, Trump also steered his speech into a broadside against a separate Justice Department investigation into the mishandling of classified documents.
“I never thought anything like this could happen in America — never thought it could happen,” Trump told an audience of several hundred donors, political allies, and other supporters after returning to Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront mansion in southern Florida.
“The only crime that I’ve committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it… It’s an insult to our country.”
-The New Indian Express
