Democratic Sen. Durbin to the public: Focus on weight of Trump charges, not political forecasting

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin on Tuesday said former President Donald Trump faces some of the “most serious charges ever leveled against an American public figure” after an Atlanta-based grand jury handed up an indictment accusing him of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 results in Georgia.

Mr. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said every criminal defendant is entitled to the presumption of innocence, including Mr. Trump. But he tried to combat Mr. Trump’s claims the charges and a trio of other indictments are intended to thwart the GOP presidential front-runner’s 2024 ambitions.

“This is not routine political fare or just another day in American politics as former President Trump would have us believe. Donald Trump stands accused of some of the most serious charges ever leveled against an American public figure,” Mr. Durbin said. “Former President Trump is accused of concealing top-secret intelligence documents; destroying evidence; provoking a mob to storm the Capitol building and subvert the counting of votes in a presidential election; and attempting to overturn the legally cast votes of American citizens. In the history of wrongdoing, both alleged and proven, few — if any — crimes by a public official reach this level of wrongdoing.”

Mr. Durbin urged the American public to focus on the impact the pending trials of Mr. Trump will have on the “survival of our republic” before speculating about the political consequences.

His statement is a rebuttal to Mr. Trump, who says the Georgia charges — plus two federal indictments over sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago and post-2020 election efforts and a New York indictment over hush payments — are baseless and amount to a form of election interference.

Mr. Trump is doubling down on his claims about the election vs. now-President Biden. He will hold a press conference at his New Jersey golf club on Monday to outline his findings about alleged fraud in Georgia during the 2020 election.