District attorney condemns Trump’s ‘inflammatory’ comments in hush money case

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The district attorney whose office is preparing for the arrest of Donald Trump has condemned “baseless and inflammatory” claims about the case against the former president, as the country once again grapples with the trustworthiness of its judicial system.

Mr. Trump has decried what he called a politically motivated “witch hunt,” accusing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan of conspiring against him, after a grand jury voted Thursday to indict Mr. Trump. The specific charges have not yet been made public.

On Friday, Mr. Bragg responded in a letter to Republican congressional committee chairs who have demanded information about the probe into allegations that Mr. Trump made payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged extramarital affair before the 2016 election.

“You and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump’s efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations” about the political nature of the proceedings, Mr. Bragg wrote.

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He urged lawmakers to “let the criminal-justice process proceed without unlawful political interference.”

The statement underscored a contradiction at the heart of Mr. Trump’s increasingly intense disputes with the justice system. It’s a conflict that has added to public mistrust of the country’s courts, even as those courts have worked to constrain the misinformation and violence that have plagued U.S. political life.

“We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!” Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters, said Friday. She pledged to be in New York on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump is expected to arrive for his arraignment and formal arrest. That process is likely to include a mugshot but not handcuffs for Mr. Trump, U.S. media reported.

“This is Total War,” the New York Young Republican Club declared. Those posting to internet forums supportive of Mr. Trump sprinkled their anger over the indictment with references to civil war. “This doesn’t stop until evil people start being found with a high lead count in their blood,” one person wrote.

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Police in New York have been placed on heightened alert, after repeated calls from Mr. Trump in recent weeks for protests. He has sought a display of anger from an electorate where new public-opinion research shows that only a minority of people believe the precedent-setting charges against a former president reflect an equal application of justice.

Sixty-two per cent of those surveyed in a Quinnipiac University national poll released this week said politics is the primary reason for the Manhattan case against Mr. Trump, a tally that includes 93 per cent of Republicans but also nearly a third of Democrats. The numbers reflect a widespread cynicism among the electorate, said Tim Malloy, a polling analyst for Quinnipiac.

“There’s a general concern and sadness over where the country’s going.”

But for now, at least, there are few signs that public anger will result in a reprise of the insurrectionism that brought rioters into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a spasm of violence that both crystallized Mr. Trump’s fractious influence on the country’s politics and set in motion forces to counter it.

More than 1,000 people have been charged in relation to the events of Jan. 6, in what the U.S. Justice Department has called the most wide-ranging investigation in its history.

“People are, I think, spooked,” said Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher who studies online extremism at Media Matters for America, a not-for-profit research group.

He monitors pro-Trump conversation in different parts of the internet, where the response to the indictment has includes some threats of violence. “But in terms of clear indications of organizing, I haven’t really seen it,” he said.

Stop The Steal, a group that helped to organize protesters on Jan. 6, is among the groups that have opposed demonstrations against the indictment.

“Stop the Steal won’t be participating in any New York City protests,” said Ali Alexander, a far-right provocateur who is among the group’s most prominent organizers. He described the environment in New York as hostile for supporters of Mr. Trump.

“Marxists, violent antifa thugs and political prosecutions make it virtually impossible to exercise our First Amendment rights there as patriots,” he said.

Some on the right have also argued that the arrest of Mr. Trump will elevate his status as he seeks to re-enter the White House. “If you think this is a good thing, that probably lessens your feeling of wanting to protest, to commit violence,” Mr. Kaplan noted.

Mr. Trump himself has not reiterated calls for protest since the indictment was announced, choosing instead to describe himself as a victim in a series of posts to Truth Social Friday.

The intensity of the investigations into his conduct, he wrote, in all capitals, “must make me the honest and honourable man in the world. Nobody in history has ever been through the scrutiny that I have.”