Crenshaw says legal woes could make general election ‘tougher’ for Trump

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) said Thursday a third indictment could make the former president’s chances in a general election “tougher.”

Crenshaw said it would be “silly” not to think Trump’s legal woes could affect his chances in 2024.

“I hope that doesn’t offend anyone to state that fact, but it’s pretty obviously true,” he told CNN.

His comments came as a new superseding indictment was levied against Trump by the Justice Department in the classified documents case Thursday. The new charges accuse the former president and two co-conspirators of trying to delete surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. 

Crenshaw has occasionally broken with his party’s hard-line support of Trump and his ideology in the past, once telling a heckler purporting the claims of the 2020 election being “stolen” for President Biden at a fundraiser that they were “kidding” themselves.

“This is something you gotta accept. Is there a lot of voter fraud? Yeah, there probably is. Enough that Trump won? No, absolutely not,” Crenshaw said in response to the heckler. “Absolutely not. Five different states? Hundreds of thousands of votes? You’re kidding yourself.”