Trump threatens prosecution of 2024 election officials if he wins presidency
Former President Donald Trump
(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump on Saturday threatened prosecution and “long term prison sentences” for election officials and political operatives, who he suggested could cheat in the 2024 election, if he again wins the presidency in November.
Trump, again falsely claiming Democrats engaged in fraudulent behavior in 2020, said that he, attorneys and legal scholars are “watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely.”
“WHEN I WIN,” Trump wrote in a post on his social network, Truth Social, that he later also shared on X, “those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law.”
Trump’s threats of prosecution — part of his repeated efforts to cast doubt on the integrity of the 2024 election — come as early voting will soon be underway in a number of states. Trump has routinely suggested he would weaponize the justice system to go after his political opponents if voters return him to the White House — threats that began after he was first indicted in his Manhattan hush money case more than a year ago.
Trump, who regularly spreads conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and falsely claims there was widespread voter fraud, added on Saturday, “I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation!”
Despite Trump’s repeated claims, the 2020 election was highly secure, and he lost to Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes. There is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome of the election in any state.
In a post on Sunday, Trump also called on the FBI to investigate mail-in ballots in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania — which are set to go out to voters soon — and cited an interview with an “election expert” conducted by former Fox News host and far-right commentator Tucker Carlson that claimed a fifth of the state’s mail-in ballots were fraudulent.
The former president has for years falsely claimed that mail-in voting leads to fraud and pointed to supposed examples in swing states, including Pennsylvania, in 2020. Despite these claims, Trump’s campaign over the summer launched a new program aimed at promoting absentee, mail-in and early in-person voting ahead of the November election.
Election officials have been the victims of pervasive threats as the 2024 election draws closer, CNN has reported, and elections operations have beefed up security in the face of harassment of elections workers and disinformation about the voting process.
Trump said Saturday he was eyeing everyone from lawyers and donors to voters. “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote. “Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country,” he added.
Trump still faces his own charges over election interference stemming from efforts to subvert the 2020 election, including a four-count indictment in his federal case. A separate election interference case against him in Fulton County, Georgia has been indefinitely paused.
This story has been updated with new reporting.
CNN’s Daniel Dale, Kristen Holmes, Ethan Cohen, Dianne Gallagher, Aaron Cooper and Aaron Pellish contributed to this report.
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