Accusation Won’t Change Our Minds

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Trump will soon face an indictment in New York over a “hush-money” payment to Stormy Daniels. Insider asked all five GOP senators who backed Trump in 2024 whether impeachment would change their support. “He gets charged every time he flies to a state,” quipped Sen. Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville. Loading Something is loading.

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Donald Trump is about to make history as the first former president to be criminally indicted. If that happens, he vows to stay in the 2024 presidential race.

And Republican senators who have already endorsed his third White House bid appear to be sticking with him regardless.

“He gets charged every time he flies to a state,” quipped Sen. Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville. “They’ve been after him, the media has been after him, ever since he ran and nothing will change for me. I mean, it’s — we got a lot more problems than that.”

Since Trump announced his 2024 run in November, five senators — Tuberville, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, JD Vance of Ohio, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, and Eric Schmitt of Missouri — have pledged their support for his candidacy.

Aside from Graham, each of them are freshman lawmakers who won their 2022 Senate primaries with the help of the former president’s endorsements.

The Insider spoke with four of the five senators Thursday at the Capitol about possible indictment of the former president, an increasingly plausible scenario as a New York grand jury hears evidence about the effort to pay off the adult film actress who Stormy Daniels during Trump’s first presidential run. in 2016 to prevent him from saying goodbye to an alleged affair.

Trump claimed the payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen were for legal fees, and condemned the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation as politically motivated and unconvincing — defenses echoed by some of the senators. .

“They’ve been saying that for a long time,” Mullin said, apparently expressing doubt that an indictment could ever come. “Listen, all this stuff they keep going after the president is political, it’s always been political.”

Schmitt, for his part, abruptly declined to comment when asked about the possibility of an indictment of Trump.

“I’m gonna go back to my office, thanks,” he said while riding the train in the basement of the Capitol.

Vance — a vocal critic of Trump who reversed himself in the middle of his run for a Senate seat in Ohio — indicated he was unaware of an impending indictment, but denied it when informed.

“No, I don’t think the Stormy Daniels case is going to change how I view her,” Vance said.

Insider has reached out to Graham’s office for comment and will update this story if we hear back.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is investigating Trump’s role in hush money payments during his 2016 campaign. Cohen previously pleaded guilty and served prison time to facilitating a $130,000 payment to Daniels in exchange for his silence about her alleged relationship with Trump.

Cohen claimed that Trump authorized the payment, and told investigators that Trump later paid him $35,000 in checks that Cohen claimed were reimbursements for hush money.

Trump, however, denied having a relationship with Daniels, claimed the payments to Cohen were for legal fees, and slammed the investigation as a “scam.”

Trump’s lawyers are preparing for the DA to charge Trump with falsifying business records in an effort to prove those payments were secret campaign expenses, Insider’s Laura Italiano reported.

Trump’s personal check for $35,000, made payable to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen, is key evidence in the “hush money” scheme being investigated by Manhattan prosecutors. House Oversight Committee

A star witness, Cohen appeared Wednesday before a Manhattan grand jury hearing evidence in the case to offer his final testimony, and Trump was invited to testify but declined — signs that an indictment of the former president may be near.

The senators’ comments Thursday signaled that Trump’s staunchest supporters are unlikely to be surprised by the legal drama surrounding him, as the former president tries to fend off rivals to his frontrunner status. for the GOP presidential nomination. A Quinnipiac University poll on Wednesday found that Trump currently leads Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to launch a campaign, by more than 10 percentage points.

Trump also recently suggested that an indictment could be politically beneficial for him — a notion Tuberville echoed on Thursday.

“Yes, probably,” he said. “It got its name there.”

Trump is under investigation in several other major criminal cases, including Georgia’s Fulton County investigation into efforts by him and his allies to subvert the state’s 2020 election results.

US special counsel Jack Smith is also overseeing the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump’s role in challenging the 2020 election results and the riots at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as his potential wrongdoing handling of classified documents obtained from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

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