Twice-impeached former President Donald Trump is actively looking to exert his influence over the 2022 midterm elections as well as to exact revenge over Republicans who are not loyal enough to him. Trump’s recent endorsement of Alaska GOP governor Mike Dunleavy’s re-election bid was slammed on CNN.
CNN host Jim Acosta ripped into Trump’s recent endorsement of Dunleavy. The former president offered his endorsement of Dunleavy’s re-election bid in exchange for Dunleavy’s non-endorsement of Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski has been drawing the ire of the former president all the way back since his 2016 presidential campaign and recently, was among the Republican Senators to vote to convict Trump during his second Senate impeachment trials.
Acosta said Trump’s statement expressing his endorsement “sounds like the lease on an apartment I rented back in the 1990s.” Acosta also said that the former president sounded “like a used car salesman. You know, got to read the fine print here in this endorsement, I suppose.”
“Have you ever heard of this kind of conditional endorsement before? This is the kind of thing I suppose that happens behind the scenes with the former president, but he – he did kind of say the quiet part out loud, this is how he operates,” said Acosta.
“He has a track record of using intimidation to advance his political goals, but this is clearly the most egregious example of basically a quid pro quo in the negative. That is, if you do something, I will take something away,” Acosta explained.
Trump was impeached for the second time for inciting the Capitol insurrection on January 6, and as the House committee probing the riots is in the midst of investigating the events, the former president has sought to block the National Archives from releasing his White House records to the panel. Despite getting rejected by the federal court and an Appeals Court, the former president now took his case to the Supreme Court.
In a 44-page legal filing by the January 6 committee, the panel cited previous rulings that rejected Trump’s case of seeking to block records from his White House from being turned over. Trump claimed executive privilege, but the claim was waived by the Biden White House. The panel also cited the past precedent of Nixon v. The United States in their filing, where a president cannot withhold documents in a criminal investigation.