Former US President Donald Trump speaks about the recent derailment of a train carrying hazardous waste, during an event at a fire station in East Palestine, Ohio, February 22, 2023.
Alan freed | Reuters
Former president donald trump said on Saturday he would remain in the 2024 presidential race even if he faces criminal charges in ongoing investigations into his handling of White House documents and alleged tampering with the 2020 election.
Trump made the promise in response to Newsmax’s James Rosen, a former Fox News reporter, at a press conference at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, Rosen tweeted on Saturday.
Trump launched his 2024 White House Bid in November, a week after Republicans lost a number of important midterm races.
Recent GOP voter poll showed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, widely seen as Trump’s main challenger, would beat Trump if the two faced off. DeSantis has not yet launched a presidential candidacy.
Trump’s campaign comes amid an ongoing Justice Department investigation into whether he removed nearly 3,000 White House documents and potentially tampered with the 2020 election results. nearly 200,000 pages of documents of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in September.
On Friday, Trump’s lawyers asked a federal court to bar his former vice president, Mike Pence, from addressing a grand jury regarding alleged efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 election defeat, invoking executive privilege, multiple news outlets reported.
The new filing was submitted Friday under sealed procedure, according to CNN. This is not the first time Trump’s legal team has claimed executive privilege to prevent Pence from testifying.
The investigation came after Trump was fired twice with felony charges, once for allegedly using U.S. foreign aid to extort Ukraine and a second time for allegedly instigating the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.