Former President Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox News’ Mark Levin that he had “every right” to interfere in a presidential election.
The host of the Life, Liberty and Levin The show discussed the Republican nominee’s ongoing legal troubles in the 2024 campaign, including Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election subversion case.
Levin, a lawyer and longtime conservative commentator, said President Joe Biden or Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris could tell the attorney general to “stop” federal prosecutions against Trump. He then asked, “This election interference never stops, right?”
“Actually, but you know the good news, it’s so crazy that my poll numbers are up. Anybody heard that you were indicted for interfering in a presidential election, when you have every right to do that, you get indicted and your poll numbers are up. When people get indicted, your poll numbers go down,” Trump said during the second part of a taped interview that aired Sunday night.
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Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, faces four federal charges in the case over his alleged attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election, which the former president has claimed were stolen from him through widespread voter fraud despite a lack of substantial evidence.
The charges against him include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, attempted obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and claims the case is politically motivated.
On Tuesday, Smith filed a revised indictment against Trump, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in July that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts, but not for acts as a private citizen or candidate. Trump has argued that his actions were official acts and therefore he should not be prosecuted.
Prosecutors, however, say he was acting as a private citizen in many of his alleged attempts to overturn the election results. In the latest indictment, Smith emphasized that Trump was acting as a candidate — not president — when he tried to overturn the 2020 election. The indictment still includes the four criminal counts Trump was originally charged with.
The former president also faces an election interference case that alleges Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, a key swing state that narrowly supported President Joe Biden four years ago. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation focuses on Trump’s call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump urged him to “find” enough votes to swing the election in his favor, as well as an alleged plot to submit a fake slate of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College.
It is not yet clear when or if a trial will take place in Georgia, but the case is unlikely to be heard before the November presidential election.
In a case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump in late May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to subvert the 2016 presidential election by concealing “hush money” payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had an affair about a decade earlier.
The former president, who denies any affair and says all of his legal cases are part of a “witch hunt” by Democrats, has argued that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity, which grants immunity for certain official acts of sitting presidents, means his convictions should be overturned.
Trump also faced 40 federal charges in federal court led by Judge Aileen Cannon over his alleged handling of sensitive documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after he left the White House in January 2021. He was also accused of obstructing federal authorities’ efforts to recover them.
Cannon, a Trump appointee to the Florida federal court, dismissed all charges against the former president in his classified documents case after claiming Smith was wrongly appointed as special counsel.
Smith has now appealed that decision to a federal appeals court in Florida, writing in an Aug. 26 filing that Cannon’s “private citizen” remark was more than 150 years out of date.
Newsweek I emailed the Trump and Kamala Harris campaigns for comment Sunday night.
Trump’s comments to Levin aired Sunday night drew an immediate response online.
Legal analyst and MSNBC anchor Katie Phang reposted a clip of the Fox News interview on X, formerly Twitter, and wrote: “Criminalize and then confess to the crime. That’s a Trump specialty.”
Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance wrote on X: “There is no right to interfere in a presidential election,” she said. “This is the banality of evil here: Trump claiming he can override the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost. And he will do it again. We must vote against him in large numbers.”
In the first part of Levin’s interview that aired Saturday night, Trump discussed Vice President Kamala Harris’ aggressive questioning style ahead of their scheduled Sept. 10 debate.
Trump said Harris “fought against people like I’ve never seen before” during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh’s confirmation hearing in 2018.
“And her whole life she fought against people like I’ve never seen before… Look at the way she fought against Judge Kavanaugh. The cruelty and the violence,” he said. “She’s a Marxist,” Trump said.
This is a developing topic and will be updated with more information.
Updated: 01/09/2024, 11:25 PM ET: This article has been updated with more information.
