Lake County Gazette

Joseph Ptak, of Island Lake, is slamming the prosecution of former president Donald Trump. 

Ptak formerly was project manager for GOP gubernatorial Gary Rabine and is a former village board candidate. 

“The Left-wing media hates President Trump so much that they will gladly follow the instructions of the Democrats to divide the Republican Party faithful as much as possible,” Ptak said on Facebook. “I suspect the left-wing media will use the same tactics they used to destroy the TEA Party. It worked for them.” “Unfortunately, this is not a very convincing win for President Trump. I suspect that other candidates who eventually enter the GOP POTUS Primary will mostly take votes away from President Trump and not Ron DeSantis if he announces his candidacy.” 

The indictment against Trump lists 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. The charges were brought by Bragg whose predecessor had refused the charges as misdemeanors for six years. Bragg ran for office on the promise of prosecuting Trump, Washington Examiner reported.

Trump is accused of making a number of improper payments in 2017 “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission” in many cases through invoices from his former attorney Michael Cohen, according to the court document.

In comments at his Mar-A-Lago estate in the wake of the arraignment Trump, who pledged not guilty, denounced the charges. 

“This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election, and it should be dropped immediately,” Trump said. 

He noted the interference of intelligence agencies in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the November 2020 election. 

“Just recently, the FBI and DOJ in collusion with Twitter and Facebook in order not to say anything bad about the Hunter Biden laptop from him, which exposes the Biden family as criminals and which, according to the pollsters, would have made a 17 point difference in the election result,” Trump said. “And we needed a lot less than that. Like about 16.9. It would have been in our favor, not my favor our favor because our country is going to hell. And we remember the 51 intelligence agents who said Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. It didn't exist. It was Russian disinformation. Remember that? And that was all confirmed strongly by the FBI when they all knew that it wasn't Russian disinformation and so much more.”