WASHINGTON: Fresh off Donald Trump’s 37-count indictment, several top Republicans, including White House hopefuls Mike Pence and Asa Hutchinson, on Sunday (Jun 18) criticised the ex-president’s handling of classified information as rivals plot their potential paths to 2024.
The comments, including harsh criticism from former Trump defence secretary Mark Esper, came on the first round of major weekend political talk shows since Trump pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom on Tuesday to mishandling some of the US government’s most sensitive secrets.
Prosecutors also allege that Trump schemed to prevent federal investigators from recovering the classified material, which he took with him upon leaving the White House.
The remarks on Sunday stand in sharp contrast to those of many Republicans in Congress who have either defended Trump or declined to criticise 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 ex-boss’s behavior in the documents affair.
Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, went further, calling the allegations “serious and disqualifying”.
“I think that he should drop out” of the 2024 race, Hutchinson told ABC’s This Week.
Trump, who has claimed the Department of Justice is being weaponised 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.
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