Polling figures show Trump currently leads the field with 59% of the vote, according to the current numbers at Pro.MorningConsult.com. That’s a slight increase since news broke of his indictment for alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Opinions have been mixed on the legitimacy of this indictment of Trump compared to the indictment brought by a New York grand jury called by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the spring.
“I think this indictment smacks of politicization,” Ramaswamy said on American Family Radio Wednesday.
In response to Trump's federal court drama this week, Ramaswamy has asked all GOP candidates to sign a pledge saying if they are elected president, they would pardon Trump.
“Our party should not hide from where we actually fall on this,” Ramaswamy told show host Jenna Ellis. “This is a major issue. Every candidate in this race should be clear about what as U.S. President we would actually do."
Trump’s former AG sees trouble in indictment
When the indictment was announced last week, Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, said it has real legs.
"As the facts come out, I think over time people will see that this is not a case of the Department of Justice conducting a witch hunt. In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the president – and this would've gone nowhere had the president just returned the documents,” he said.
Barr then unloaded on Trump. "He jerked them around for a year and a half, and the question is, did he deceive them? And if there's evidence of that, I think people will start to see that this says more about Trump than it does the Department of Justice," said the former attorney general.
Others see another example of the weaponization of government resources, a glaring one, as a sitting president, Joe Biden, has charges brought against his chief political rival.
The indictment also looks fishy to many considering neither Hillary Clinton nor Biden were indicted for their own alleged mishandling of information whether written or spoken. Neither was former president Bill Clinton, who famously kept audiotapes of interviews in a sock drawer.
“There are deep questions about the Presidential Records Act," Ramaswamy observed. "How it's been interpreted as recently as in 2012 in the Clinton sock drawer case. Selective omissions of fact and law that make me deeply suspicious of what the government's actually after here."
The Presidential Records Act of 1978 is a federal law that governs the official records of presidents and vice presidents created or received after Jan. 20, 1981.
In 2012, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Jackson, responding to a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, said there was no legal mechanism the National Archives could use to force President Bill Clinton to make public tapes that author Taylor Branch made of he and Clinton for his 2009 book “The Clinton Tapes.”
Clinton had argued the tapes – stored in his sock drawer for a time -- were personal property, and Jackson’s decision supported that theory.
GOP leaders 'galvanized' over Trump indictment
Lawrence Wilson, the national politics reporter for The Epoch Times, says the indictment doesn’t hinder Trump from a strictly legal standpoint.
“In a legal sense, there is no implication whatsoever. There is no law requiring that the president of the United States not have been indicted on federal charges, not have been convicted, or not even letting he not be in jail,” Wilson said on Washington Watch Tuesday.
“So this does not stop the Trump campaign,” Wilson told show host Tony Perkins. “In fact, many observers believe that it's giving it energy because, of course, it catapults Trump to the top of the news cycle from now till who knows when, and it has really enlivened his base.”
The same was true after the New York indictment and, before that, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago outraged many who rallied to Trump's side.
Time will tell how the GOP field responds to Ramaswamy’s challenge. Wilson believes the early response from Republicans has been favorable for Trump.
“It has kind of rallied the support of some Republican leaders who had seemed to be saying, ‘You know, maybe the Trump era is over.' Maybe had been open to the idea of considering other candidates," Wilson said of the GOP. "But now, of course, there are many of them including for example, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, attacking the DOJ for this indictment, attacking the Biden administration for this. So it has galvanized some Republican leaders.”
Meanwhile, Ramaswamy has submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request hoping to learn about conversations between Biden, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and prosecutor Jack Smith in an effort to “hold (the administration) accountable in a way the media is not holding them accountable.”
FOIA requests take time and are subject to redactions of information deemed sensitive.
Signing a pledge for pardon at this stage of the game could be considered a bold move since more will be learned through discovery and in open court, but Ramaswamy says he’s seen enough.
“I think it’s a fair assumption the prosecutor puts up their best version of the case in the indictment,” he said. “So what does that mean? It means there isn’t evidence of selling secrets to our enemies, of taking multi-million-dollar bribes from foreign nations to influence what access they get. You might say that’s unthinkable for a president in the White House, but that’s another discussion for Biden.”
Without explosive allegations of that nature, the pledge for a Trump pardon is an easy call, Ramaswamy insists. Citing the Judge Jackson ruling about the Presidential Records Act, in the Clinton interview tapes ruling, he compares that case to a sitting president using the DOJ to arrest and charge his main opponent.
"I think that is a dangerous path for our country,” Ramaswamy said.
