Fresh off former US president Donald Trump’s 37-count indictment, several top Republicans, including White House hopefuls former US vice president Mike Pence and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, on Sunday criticized Trump’s handling of classified information as rivals plot their potential paths to next year’s US presidential election.
The comments, including harsh criticism from former US secretary of defense Mark Esper, came on the first round of major weekend political talk shows since Trump pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom on Tuesday last week to mishandling some of the US government’s most sensitive secrets.
Prosecutors also alleged that Trump schemed to prevent federal investigators from recovering the classified material, which he took with him upon leaving the White House.
Photo: AP
The remarks on Sunday stand in sharp contrast to those of many Republicans in the US Congress who have either defended Trump or declined to criticize him.
“I can’t defend what is alleged,” Pence, Trump’s former vice president, told NBC’s Sunday talk show Meet the Press, alluding to his former boss’ behavior in the documents affair.
Hutchinson went further, calling the allegations “serious and disqualifying.”
“I think that he should drop out” of next year’s race, Hutchinson told ABC’s This Week.
Trump, who has claimed the US Department of Justice is being weaponized against him, is accused in the indictment of endangering national security by illegally keeping top-secret military plans and nuclear weapons information at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The case is one of multiple legal challenges casting a shadow over his run for another term in the White House.
“If the allegations are true, that it contained information about our nation’s security ... it could be quite harmful to the nation,” Esper told CNN’s State of the Union.
Echoing remarks last week by the special prosecutor who filed the charges, Esper said “no one is above the law,” and called the revelations “disturbing.”
Republican presidential contenders are finding themselves in the tricky position of trying to stake out room between themselves and Trump, the party’s current clear frontrunner, without alienating his loyal and powerful base.
“The former president deserves his day in court,” Pence said. “I want to reserve judgment about this until he’s had an opportunity to take his case into the courtroom.”
Pence also made clear that he and Trump “have parted ways” on other issues as well, including on the national debt.
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who threw his hat in the ring last week with a vow to directly take on Trump, on Sunday blasted the former president for “constantly whining and complaining and moaning about how things are unfair.”
Christie, a former federal prosecutor, also attacked Trump for berating ex-underlings who cross or disappoint him.
“He’s a petulant child when someone disagrees with him,” Christie told CNN.
“If this indictment is true ... president Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security,” former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley told Fox News on Monday last week.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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