Trump guarantees to remain within the 2024 presidential marketing campaign even when he faces prison fees

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks about the recent derailment of a hazardous waste train during an event at a fire station in eastern Palestine, Ohio, on February 22, 2023.

Alan Freed | Reuters

Former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would stay on in the 2024 presidential campaign even if he faces criminal charges in the ongoing investigation into his handling of White House documents and alleged vote-rigging in 2020.

Trump made the promise in response to Newsmax’s James Rosen, a former Fox News reporter, at a press conference at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Rosen tweeted Saturday.

Trump launched his 2024 White House candidacy in November, a week after Republicans lost a number of key midterm races.

Recent polls of GOP voters showed that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely regarded as Trump’s main rival, would beat Trump if the two went head-to-head. DeSantis has not yet run for the presidency.

Trump’s campaign comes amid an ongoing Justice Department investigation into whether he removed nearly 3,000 documents from the White House and possibly rigged the 2020 election results. The FBI seized nearly 200,000 pages of documents from Trump’s possessions in Mar-a-Lago in September.

On Friday, Trump’s attorneys asked a federal court to bar his former Vice President Mike Pence from speaking before a grand jury over alleged efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss and claimed executive branch privilege, multiple media outlets reported.

The new application was filed in sealed proceedings on Friday, according to CNN. It’s not the first time Trump’s legal team has invoked executive privilege to prevent Pence from testifying.

The investigation came after Trump was indicted twice on counts of serious felonies and misdemeanors, once for allegedly using US foreign aid to blackmail Ukraine and a second time for allegedly instigating the Jan. 6 riot in the US Capitol.