Donald Trump went on a wild, fact-free tirade against his political foes on Tuesday in an expected response to the long-awaited criminal indictment that finally was released by prosecutors in Manhattan earlier in the day.
In one of the president’s typical rambling addresses, he swiped at any rival he could think of while decrying the Democrats as well as federal and state authorities around the nation as his mortal foes. And in trademark Trump fashion, he did it in a way that likely delighted the closest of his followers but probably left most Americans watching his speech wondering why it has taken so long for the legal system to catch up with him.
Completely unprompted, he brought up the investigation into his phone call to a top Georgia elections official asking them to “find” thousands of votes in his favour, and compared it to his efforts to pressure Ukraine’s president into becoming something of a political attack dog against the Biden family.
It was a surreal moment of American history that ended much faster than most of Mr Trump’s long-winded campaign addresses but nevertheless touched upon many of the same themes, including most importantly the former president’s longstanding effort to weaken trust in just about every system in America meant to act as a neutral arbiter of justice or law.
And it was chock full of the falsehoods that Mr Trump has long enjoyed weaponising against his enemies, with no regard for the truth.
Let’s take a look at some of the big ones:
The Justice Department isn’t investigating Joe Biden over handling of presidential records
Angrily assaulting the National Archives and Justice Department over the criminal investigation into his handling of presidential records and classified materials, the former president raged that investigators were only looking into his actions when troves of presidential records had been discovered similarly at the homes of President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence.
That, of course, is not true. The Justice Department has been in contact and a working relationship with the Biden legal team ever since the first discovery of records at a think tank connected to Mr Biden, and is simply handling that investigation through a separate special counsel.
The National Archives is a far-left organisation
This one almost deserves to be ignored from the get-go. As part of his criticism of efforts to investigate his handling of presidential records, Mr Trump made the confusing assertion that the US National Archives is a “radical left troublemaking organization”.
The idea that a stuffy library in Washington DC is actually a hotbed of antifa radicals may be entertaining, but is sadly not based in fact. The National Archives merely had the bad luck of picking a fight with Mr Trump’s legal team after he, by his own account, apparently allowed or directly ordered his aides to scoop up documents from the White House for transport to Mar-a-Lago as he was all but dragged out of office in January 2021.
Federal law enforcement colluded with social media companies to stop Trump in 2020
One of the Trump circle’s favourite refrains in recent months has been the assertion that he would have won the 2020 election were it not for social media companies suppressing the reach of a story that broke in late 2020 about a laptop owned by Hunter Biden being obtained by far-right activists. At the time, federal officials apparently warned executives at companies like Twitter and Facebook that the story had the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation effort, which ended up not being the case.
Republicans have argued that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop suggest criminal activity by the younger Biden and improper financial connections between the president and foreign countries through his son’s business; these claims are not substantiated by any hard proof, however, and were unlikely to sway large amounts of undecided voters in the final days of the election.
Still, the idea that there was any “collusion” between the federal government and social media companies was false: there’s no evidence that any federal agency sought to suppress the story for the purpose of hurting Mr Trump’s campaign efforts, nor is there proof of any social media companies being coerced or even specifically asked to suppress the story.
The FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago was unconstitutional
Another false statement made in the course of attacking federal law enforcement for attempting to secure presidential records that were in his possession, Mr Trump argued on Tuesday that the FBI raid of his Mar-a-Lago residence and resort was illegal.
On the contrary: a federal judge signed off on the search warrant for his home, and his own attorneys have not actually bothered to argue that the raid was improper in court. There’s also the issue of his attorneys telling the federal government before the raid that all classified materials had been handed over.
‘Virtually everyone’ thinks this case is bunk
As he trashed Alvin Bragg’s efforts to prosecute him for allegedly falsifying business records as part of his efforts to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels, Mr Trump incorrectly asserted that even anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats were taking his side.
That’s not the case. Many legal experts like former House Judiciary Committee co-counsel Norm Eisen have weighed in on the strength of the case, and disagree with the hand-wringing of a few conservative legal experts over the case. The issue of the case’s legal strength is far from settled, one way or the other.
