Former President Donald Trump mused in an interview Thursday that he or another Republican president could use the Justice Department to prosecute and indict his political opponents, as he claims his political opponents did against him.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, told Univision News that the so-called “militarization” of federal law enforcement “could certainly happen in reverse.”
A Univision reporter asked Trump: “You say they weaponized the Justice Department, they weaponized the FBI. Would you do the same thing if you were re-elected?”
“Well, he started something that everyone, we all have known about for a hundred years,” Trump said, apparently in reference to President Biden and his administration. “We’ve seen other countries do this and in some cases effectively and in other cases the country has been overthrown or has been totally ineffective. But we’ve watched this for a long time, and it’s not not unique, but it is unique for in the U.S. Yes. If they do this and they have already done it, but if they want to go through with it, yes, it could definitely happen in the backwards. It could certainly happen in reverse. What they did was they took the genie out of the box.”
The former president claimed that prosecutors “made indictments in order to win an election” and then suggested that if he were president, he might indict someone who beat him “very badly.”
“They call it militarization, and people are not going to tolerate that,” Trump said. “But yes, they did something that allows the next party. I mean, if someone – if I’m president and I see someone who’s doing well and beating me really hard, I say, ‘come down and charge him.’ Basically what it would do, you know, is they would go bankrupt. They would be excluded, they would be excluded from elections.”
Special Advisor Jack Smith filed both federal criminal charges against Trump – the Classified Documents Case and the Classified Documents Case. 2020 election interference case. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. The other two criminal cases against the former president are state cases, not federal.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr, a Trump appointee, told CBS News this summer that the case against Trump for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election was a “difficult case” but one that did not violate the Prime amendment. Barr said the case alleging Trump mishandled classified documents posed the greatest threat to Trump and was “entirely of his own making.”
The full interview will air on Univision News Thursday at 10 p.m. ET.