Ohio entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says his campaign has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover communications between the White House, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Jack Smith, special prosecutor behind the latest indictment of former President Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy plans to hold a press conference at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami, where Trump is scheduled to be arraigned on 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents.
The political outsider said he’ll make another announcement during Tuesday’s press conference, but did not go into specifics.
“My campaign just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demand to uncover exactly what the White House communicated to Merrick Garland and Jack Smith about the unprecedented indictment of a former U.S. President and Biden’s disfavored opponent in this election. Every American deserves to know,” Ramaswamy said in the statement.
“If the captured media fails to do its job, real leaders in this country need to step up and do it instead,” the 37-year-old candidate said.
Ramaswamy has blasted the indictment as the work of President Joe Biden’s politically weaponized administration targeting the unpopular Democrat’s No.1 political enemy. If elected president, the millennial candidate has pledged to pardon Trump, should he be convicted.
“Reading that indictment and looking at the selective omissions of both facts and law, … I’m even more convinced that a pardon is the right answer here,” Ramaswamy told Dana Bash Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Smith’s indictment contains felony federal charges alleging Trump mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, including 31 counts alleging the former president violated the Espionage Act law prohibiting willful retention of national defense information. He’s also charged with obstruction of justice and making false statements.
“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone,” Smith said at the press conference last week upon opening the sealed indictment. “Applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more and nothing less.”
But Ramaswamy and many of his fellow Republican candidates feel the prosecution, like others against the former president, is being driven by a lust from the left and their titular head to target the Democratic Party’s most formidable political enemy. Beyond Trump, they see a Biden-led system of disparate, two-tiered justice. Biden, too, has been found to have been in possession of classified documents.
Smith’s wife, Katy Chevigny is a Biden donor and the producer of Becoming, a documentary about Michelle Obama’s life.
“I’m running to win this election and it would be easier for me if Trump were eliminated from running, but that is not the right answer for our nation. America First Always,” Ramaswamy said.
– – –
M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Vivek Ramaswamy” by CNN.
