Donald Trump Blames Legal ‘Persecution’ on Poll Success

Donald Trump has reiterated his claim that the legal proceedings he is currently facing are politically motivated to undermine his run for the White House—but that they are having the opposite effect, improving his polling figures.

Speaking at a rally in South Carolina—in which he is currently campaigning as part of the Republican primary—on Saturday, the former president said: “All of this persecution is only happening because we’re leading so big in the polls.

“If I wasn’t running right now, or if I was in fifth place, or if I was like [Nikki] Haley—70 points down—I wouldn’t be under indictment; I wouldn’t have any problems right now.”

The former president is currently embroiled in four criminal cases relating to a variety of charges—in all of which he has denied any wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty. While two have been brought by the Department of Justice, two have been initiated by district attorneys in New York and Georgia.

Department of Justice prosecutors have previously rejected claims of political bias against Trump as false and demeaning of their professional conduct.

Trump cited a recent Morning Consult survey of 3,752 likely voters, conducted between February 4-6, which gave him a 68 percentage point lead over his only remaining rival, former ambassador to the U.N. and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

At the same time, recent national polls have the expected Republican nominee Trump leading his likely Democrat rival, President Joe Biden, by at least a percentage point.

Elsewhere in his speech, Trump again depicted the Department of Justice as being unfair, comparing the recent result of a special counsel investigation into the retaining of classified documents by Biden to his own charges concerning mishandling sensitive files.

“You probably know, two days ago the Biden department of injustice let crooked Joe [Biden] off the hook for some of his very egregious crimes—including his brazen theft of classified documents, long before he was ever president,” Trump claimed.

The former president added: “In my case, I’m covered by the Presidential Records Act. I’m allowed to do what I do. But he wasn’t covered.”

In 2022, classified documents were found at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home, as well as in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center, a think tank in Washington. The discoveries prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to oversee an investigation into whether the classified material was mishandled.

Special Counsel Robert Hur—a Republican attorney appointed by Trump—found that even though the president “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” while a private citizen, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even if Biden was not the sitting president. He also noted that Biden and the White House cooperated with investigators throughout.

After leaving office, Trump took 15 boxes of documents to his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, residence, despite being asked to hand them over to the National Archives under the requirements of the Presidential Records Act. This led to a raid of the property by the FBI in August 2022.

Trump has repeatedly claimed he is protected under the act, and that the documents he took were of a personal nature. But legal experts and the National Archives and Records Administration have said that some of the documents related to official matters, and so were government property.

Despite finding no criminal wrongdoing on the part of Biden, Hur questioned the president’s mental fitness in his report, describing the president’s memory as “significantly limited” during interviews and stating that he could not remember when he ceased being vice president, nor when his son Beau died.

Beau Biden, the former attorney general of Delaware and eldest son of the president and his first wife, died of a brain tumor in 2015. His death is something Joe Biden has often referenced in his public speeches.

Already the oldest serving president in U.S. history, Biden has increasingly faced questions about his age and mental acuity that he has repeatedly brushed off. It is something that has concerned voters ahead of the 2024 election, and has been used to attack his run.

Biden Accused of Being a ‘Basket Case’

“This is yet more proof that we have a weaponized, two-tier system of justice in this country,” Trump asserted on Saturday. “Crooked Joe got off scot-free—I don’t know if you’d call it scot-free; they said he was a mental basket case. I wouldn’t say it’s totally scot-free. In fact, I think, maybe, if I had my choice, I’d take the other [option]; I’d go through a little process, but that’s better than what happened.”

Newsweek approached the White House via email for comment on Sunday.

After Hur’s report emerged this week, Joe Biden appeared angered by some of the assertions in the report, telling a news conference on Thursday: “I don’t need anyone—anyone—to remind me when [Beau] passed away.”

In an email to campaign donors on Saturday, seen by The Associated Press, first lady Jill Biden wrote: “We should give everyone grace, and I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”