Former Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, a noted anti-Trump Republican who later switched over to the Libertarian Party, slammed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of the former president, calling it flimsy and dubious.
“After reading DA Bragg’s indictment of Trump and accompanying statement of facts, I’m stunned any prosecutor would move forward with this. It’s even flimsier than we were led to believe. Thirty-four stacked counts, bootstrapped to an unstated crime, to manufacture felony charges,” he tweeted.
Amash famously supported the impeachment of President Trump during his tenure in the White House over the flimsy Robert Mueller report. He also called Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy “conniving and fundamentally dishonest” after tape recordings emerged of McCarthy in early 2022 excoriating Trump on a private conference call with other GOP leaders.
“I met a lot of duplicitous people in Congress but none more conniving and fundamentally dishonest than Kevin McCarthy,” Amash tweeted after the McCarthy tapes were released in 2022. “He will say or do whatever he thinks is necessary at a particular moment to obtain or maintain power.”
As Breitbart News reported on Tuesday, the former president pled not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree relating to alleged hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels:
Trump was arrested around 1:35 p.m. and appeared before the judge, who charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business records, at 2:45 p.m.
Trump pleaded not guilty to indictment No. 71543-23.
Per the judge’s orders, the media was not allowed to live stream the court proceedings. Photographers, however, were allowed to enter the courtroom to take photos before the proceedings began. The photographers captured images for a few minutes before they were seen leaving the courtroom.
Despite rumored reports, Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan did not impose a gag order on the former president, which presumably gives him license to talk about the proceedings before it goes to trial.
“He’s frustrated, he’s upset, but I’ll tell you what: he’s motivated,” Trump attorney Todd Blanche also told reporters outside the courthouse. “[It’s] a political prosecution. The indictment itself is boilerplate.”
Related: CNN’s Cordero: Trump Indictment ‘Underwhelming’ — Nothing New
Correction: This article originally misstated context of an Amash tweet criticizing McCarthy.
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