Former President Donald Trump has given his supporters a word of encouragement in an attempt to calm their nerves in the wake of being indicted by Joe Biden’s Justice Department.
According to reports, Trump is facing decades behind bars in what would effectively be a death sentence given his age of 76 after being indicted on 37 counts over his handling of classified materials. In addition to 31 counts of willful retention of national security information, other counts include conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing documents or records, and making false statements.
“I’ll never leave,” Trump told POLITICO in an interview. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016. That was a rough one. In theory, that was not doable.”
He added that he does not believe the government will get a conviction, that he won’t take a plea deal, and that there could be a situation “where they pay me some damages.”
While no specific date has been determined for the trial, the case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump to the Southern District of Florida bench in 2020. Trump is expected to make an appearance before Cannon on Tuesday.
Regarding any plea deal, one of his attorneys, Alina Habba — who is not working on his documents indictment — told Fox News Sunday he would never take one.
“No, I could never imagine,” Habba told Bream. “I know I would never advise that. Especially when he’s not done anything wrong. You take a plea deal to make something go away. That’s an admission of guilt. He would never admit guilt because there was nothing wrong with declassifying documents, taking documents with you…”
“The only thing that was wrong was the raid on his home and the complete dual-tier system of justice that we’re seeing here when the Biden family is being treated completely differently than the Trump family,” she added. “So to plea is exactly what they would want.”
The indictment says that, as president, Trump “had lawful access to the most sensitive classified documents and national defense information gathered and owned by the United States government, including information from the agencies that comprise the United States Intelligence Community and the United States Department of Defense.”
