Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox
Get our free Inside Washington email
Clad in a fleece sweater vest, Will Scharf, an attorney for Donald Trump who wants to be Missouri’s next attorney general, fires a grenade launcher at a stack of evidence boxes and indictments in his latest campaign ad.
“Joe Biden and his corrupt allies are wrecking our legal system, doing everything they can to stop President Trump and the MAGA agenda,” he says in the ad. “It’s time for a Missouri attorney general who will return fire.”
He then cocks his firearm, and the stack of boxes explodes.
Scharf, who played a key role in Trump’s “immunity” defense from criminal prosecution and has vowed to fight his felony convictions in New York, is running in a Republican primary against the state’s current attorney general, Andrew Bailey, who is also competing for Trump’s attention with a series of lawsuits and complaints on his behalf.
The state of Missouri is not involved in litigation or criminal prosecutions involving the former president whatsoever.
The primary race between both men has spiraled into a competition for the former president’s approval with attempts to out-MAGA one another by highlighting their Trump-approved bona fides.
Within the last few months, Bailey has sued the state of New York over a court-imposed gag order against Trump, testified to Congress about what he called the “politically motivated, legally specious, and corrupt prosecution” of the former president, and demanded that the Department of Justice turn over documents about Trump’s prosecutions.
Both men have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that President Joe Biden is “weaponizing” the federal government against his Republican rival and directing the cases against him.
Last month, Scharf sparred with ABC News host George Stephanopoulos about his spurious claims, arguing that Biden and his allies are “up to their necks in this prosecution.”
“This is a tragic day in the history of the American Republic,” Scharf wrote after a jury in New York convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush money trial.
“President Trump’s conviction proves one thing and one thing only: that Joe Biden and his allies have weaponized our legal system to persecute their principal political opponent,” he added. “We will speedily appeal, and we will win on appeal because this case is meritless, baseless, and should have never seen the inside of an American courtroom.”
Scharf’s campaign also was recently awarded $2 million by a Leonard Leo-backed organization with aims to reshape the nation’s judicial system in Trump’s image.
The state’s Republican primary election is August 6.
Source: independent.co.uk
