Former US president Donald Trump has strongly condemned the criminal prosecution being brought against him in New York as “ridiculous” and an insult to the country.
He also attacked both the judge presiding over the case and the district attorney in Manhattan.
In a speech at Mar-a-Lago, his home in Florida, on Tuesday night he set out a list of grievances, some dating back to his original 2016 campaign for the White House.
He argued the US justice system had become “lawless” and that the case being taken against him was politically motivated.
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“They can’t beat us at the ballot box, so they try to beat us through the law,”
“We are a nation in decline, and now these radical left lunatics want to interfere in elections by using law enforcement”, he said.
On Tuesday Mr Trump became the first former president of the United States to be arrested and charged with a crime.
He entered a not guilty plea after being charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The case will return to court in December.
Mr Trump said everyone who had looked at this case against him had maintained that it should never have been brought.
“The only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it”, he said.
He said the criminal was the district attorney Alvin Bragg who brought the case to the grand jury, which last week voted to indict Mr Trump.
He contended, without providing evidence, that Mr Bragg had leaked information from the grand jury process.
The judge in the case on Tuesday, Juan Merchan, urged the former president and others to refrain from making statements that were likely to incite violence or civil unrest.
Several hours later in his speech in Florida, Mr Trump hit out at both the judge and his daughter as well as the district attorney in Manhattan.
“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign. And a lot of it,” Mr Trump said.
Mr Trump also hit out at those involved in other investigations into his actions and business affairs.
He urged authorities in Atlanta to “drop” a case into his effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. He described the prosecutor heading the investigation as “the local racist”.
He also described Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the US Department of Justice to investigate the attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election and the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, as a “radical-left lunatic bomb-thrower”.
Mr Trump told the audience that from the beginning the Democrats had spied on his campaign and attacked him with an onslaught of fraudulent investigations.
“Russia, Russia, Russia. Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. Impeachment hoax No1. Impeachment hoax No 2. The illegal and unconstitutional raid on Mar-a-Lago”, he said.
