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Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and potential presidential contender, is finally condemning Manhattan’s Democrat district attorney for politicizing his office after former President Trump predicted the leftist D.A. would be arresting him imminently.
On Saturday, Trump rocked the political world by using his own Truth Social platform to announce that he likely faced imminent arrest by New York City’s far-left prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, over hush-money payments to former pornography “actress” Stormy Daniels, a.k.a. Stephanie Clifford, before the 2016 election.
Speaking at a campaign event in South Carolina the same day, Republican presidential candidate and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy quickly condemned Bragg’s “political prosecution” and chided DeSantis (and fellow GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley) for not responding urgently to the leak of a potential Trump arrest:
I held a press conference following my South Carolina speech. I called on GOP donor class favorites @RonDeSantisFL and @NikkiHaley to join me by 9 AM tomorrow in calling on the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg to abandon the political persecution through prosecution of the 45th… https://t.co/UhXfV2ZroP pic.twitter.com/koSbMBwQRy
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 18, 2023
Goaded by Ramaswamy and others, DeSantis spoke out in Florida Monday morning.
“If you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush-money payments, you know, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office,” DeSantis said, as Fox News reported. “And I think that that’s fundamentally wrong.”
In making his statement, DeSantis took a not-so-subtle dig at Trump, saying, “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair…” as some people in the audience laughed.
For the record, Daniels herself tweeted in 2022 that she never had an “affair” with Trump, as has been widely alleged:
Woah! I never said it was an affair. I have said over and over that he CORNERED ME coming out of a bathroom. Well…I guess to him, that IS an affair. Seems to be his pattern.
— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) March 22, 2022
Referencing notorious leftist financier George Soros, who reportedly used his political action committee to give Bragg $1 million to get him elected in 2020, DeSantis said, “But the real victims are ordinary New Yorkers, ordinary Americans and all these different jurisdictions that they get victimized every day because of the reckless political agenda that the Soros DAs bring to their job … They ignore crime and they empower criminals, and that hurts people, hurts a lot of people every single day.”
He added, “We won’t be involved in this. I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros DA…He’s trying to do a political spectacle. He’s trying to virtue signal for his base.
