Former President Donald Trump said Friday night that after his latest federal indictment regarding allegations of trying to overturn results of the 2020 election, President Joe Biden and his administration are trying to interfere in a presidential election.
"Biden and his protectors know he cannot win this race any other way," Trump told a crowd at the Alabama Republican Party Summer Dinner in the state capital of Montgomery. "So now they're trying something that hasn't been tried in this country: election interference.
"They rigged the presidential election of 2020. We're not going to allow them to rig the presidential election of 2024."
Trump is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith delivered the four-count indictment to which Trump pleaded not guilty on Thursday. Trump said, "The nation's top legal scholars have stated the Biden administration's charges are illegal and a constitutional travesty.
"Jonathan Turley — great guy, highly, highly respected — said this is a free-speech-killing indictment, killing free speech," Trump said. "Killing free speech. That's what it is. And referring to the deranged Jack Smith, 'He's not only going to have to just bulldoze through the First Amendment, he's going to have to bulldoze through a line of cases by the Supreme Court of the United States.' In other words, this is an absolute case of prosecutorial misconduct."
Trump said the only civil rights violated have been his "and those of the countless people that Biden and the communists have been persecuting."
"Andy McCarthy — highly respected — said this: 'To indict on such a theory in a manner that quite willfully intrudes into a presidential election is worse than irresponsible,'" Trump said. "The editors at the National Review wrote, 'This Trump indictment should not stand.' It's a terrible thing they're doing to our country."
Trump said the people who are out to get him are "vicious, and they're smart. But we're smarter, and we're tougher than they are, and we're going to take it back. And we have no choice, because otherwise we're not going to have a country."