Some quickly defended Trump. Others — including Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) — took days to respond.
Here is what Republicans have said about a possible indictment of Trump.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
“Look, I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said at a news conference Monday. “I can’t speak to that.
“But what I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction and he chooses to go back many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush-money payments, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda.”
DeSantis went on to say, “We are not involved in this, won’t be involved in this. I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros D.A.,” referring to one of the Manhattan district attorney’s campaign supporters, George Soros. Soros is a frequent target of baseless right-wing accusations rooted in antisemitism.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.)
“I don’t think people should protest this, no,” McCarthy said Sunday. He added: “And I think President Trump, if you talk to him, he doesn’t believe that, either.”
McCarthy also criticized the case against Trump, telling reporters, “We need equal justice in America,” and, “Do you believe this is equal justice? Are you proud of what the Manhattan D.A. is doing?”
Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.)
“This is un-American and the radical Left has reached a dangerous new low of Third World countries,” she said in a statement, the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, N.Y., reported. “Knowing they cannot beat President Trump at the ballot box, the Radical Left will now follow the lead of Socialist dictators and reportedly arrest President Trump, the leading Republican candidate for President of the United States.”
Bragg “got pressured, I think, from the left,” Jordan told Fox News on Monday. He went on to say: “Now they’re coming after him for some alleged bookkeeping error. You’ve got to be kidding me.” The House Judiciary Committee, which Jordan chairs, is demanding that Bragg testify in Congress about this probe, plus provide a trove of documents about it.
Nikki Haley, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate
“Well, right now, it’s rumor. And I certainly hope it’s not the case …” Haley, who was ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration, told Fox News on Monday night. “But from everything I’ve seen from this New York district attorney is that this would be something he’d be doing for political points. And I think what we know is when you get into political prosecutions like this, it’s more about revenge than it is about justice. And, you know, I think the country would be better off talking about things that the American public cares about than to sit there and have to deal with some revenge by some political people in New York.”
When shown a clip of DeSantis’s remarks, and Trump’s reply on social media, Haley said, “They can go back and forth on all of that stuff,” but “the American people want us talking about things that really matter.”
Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), a possible 2024 Republican presidential candidate
“Here’s what we know about District Attorney Bragg: He does not want to lock anybody up as it relates to violent criminals,” Scott falsely claimed in an interview with a conservative radio station in his state that was published online Wednesday. Bragg, the senator continued to say falsely, “wants no jails. The only thing he wants to do is weaponize the law against his political enemies. President Trump is a victim of that. Here’s what we know for sure: This is a travesty, and it should not be happening, especially in the greatest country on Earth.”
Scott, former vice president Mike Pence and other Republicans have pushed the false notion that New York is in the midst of a crime wave even as the New York Police Department has said overall shootings and murders have declined from the previous year.
On Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Comer said: “It’s very odd that this would come out just the very next day after I revealed bank records which showed that the Biden family, the president in particular, hasn’t been truthful with respect to his family receiving payments directly from the Chinese Community Party.”
He went on to say that it “almost looks like an effort” to distract from that.
Former vice president Mike Pence
“I think it just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country. It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here,” Pence said in an interview Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week.”
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu
“I think it’s building a lot of sympathy for the former president,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Sununu said he met recently with “some folks, and they’re — none of them were big Trump supporters, but they all said they felt like he was being attacked.”
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie
On ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday, Christie said it can be true that the Manhattan district attorney is unfairly prosecuting Trump and also “that Donald Trump is not someone who could be a winning general election candidate for the Republican Party because of all these things.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate
Over the weekend, he said, “It is a sad day in America, it is dark day in America if you have the ruling party in this country using police power to arrest its political opposition. That would be the beginning of the end as we know it.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.)
“I think this is one of the worst uses of the justice system we’ve ever seen,” Donalds said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Donalds also said, “It’s going to descend all of America into further chaos.”
“We have got to start standing up for justice,” he said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Scott also said: “Stand up. I don’t care whether you like Trump or don’t like Trump. There can’t be a different standard” of justice.
Trump “used his own money to resolve a private dispute, irrespective of any campaign,” Gaetz posted to Twitter on Saturday. “This is an absurd abuse of the criminal process in our politics.”
Hannah Knowles, Lori Rozsa and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
