Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., told Newsmax on Tuesday that the indefinite postponement of former President Donald Trump's classified documents trial in Florida is "a great win" for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee's team.
"[It's a] distraction that obviously was the intention of the Democrats all along," Steube said during an appearance on Newsmax's "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE." "It wasn't necessarily to get a conviction; it was to keep him off the campaign trail, to spend millions upon millions of dollars having to defend himself in New York, in Georgia, and Florida, and all these other venues. It was a strategy, an election interference strategy, that the Democrats have employed and it's … nice that he's not going to have to deal with another one of these weaponizations of the federal government using this to interfere with the election in November."
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2020, decided that the former president's trial in Florida on charges of illegally retaining classified documents after leaving office would be indefinitely postponed, which greatly reduces the odds that he will face a jury before the presidential election on Nov. 5.
Brought by special counsel Jack Smith, the case had previously been set to go to trial on May 20, before Cannon said it would not begin then and did not set a new date.
Steube said that "after the judge slapped him down," there is no chance that Smith would be able to refile it in another, potentially more favorable, jurisdiction.
"They can't refile somewhere else because the jurisdiction of that case would be Florida because the classified documents that were at issue in the case were in Mar-a-Lago," he said. "So, Jack Smith is not going to be able to go to New York and forum shop or go to D.C. and forum shop because the jurisdiction of that case is in Florida, so he's stuck now. Thankfully, we have some good judges out there on our federal bench that can make good decisions and see this for what it is: going after the person who is our nominee and a former president. It's 100% election interference using the Department of Justice to go after their political enemy."
The Florida Republican said that the GOP-controlled House needs to start using the power of the purse to "win policy goals."
"When we ran and we got the majority, we were told from our leadership that we would use the appropriations process to win policy goals because you can use that process because you control the money," he said. "Hey, you don't like Jack Smith's investigation or the way that the FBI is handling spying on American citizens without a warrant? Cut their funding, do away with their funding. You don't like what the Department of Energy is doing in going after the domestic production of oil and gas? Cut their funding. I mean, there's all of these things that we can do and the tools that we have in the House. The framers of our Constitution gave the House the purse strings for a reason, and we need to be using it."
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