Hutchinson: I won’t vote for Trump if he is convicted

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he would not vote for Donald Trump should he end up the Republican nominee and be convicted in a criminal trial.

The declaration is one of the strongest rebukes of Trump since he was indicted on 37 counts related to allegedly mishandling classified documents. It also underscores the difficult position in which the Republican party now finds itself: with the party’s base rallying behind a frontrunner facing possible jail time and another portion of the party threatening to bolt if he’s their candidate.

In an interview Wednesday with a group of POLITICO reporters, Hutchinson presented himself as an experienced alternative to the rest of the Republican field and framed his longshot presidential candidacy as one that took fidelity to the law seriously.

“I'm not going to vote for him if he's a convicted felon,” he said. “If he’s convicted of espionage, I’m not going to vote for him.”

Hutchinson, who served two terms as governor, added that he did not believe Trump will be the Republican nominee. “I am going to do everything I can to prevent that,” he stressed.

Hutchinson added that he has disagreed with the Republican National Committee’s requirement for candidates to sign a loyalty pledge to participate in the primary debates, in part because of Trump’s legal troubles. The party, he said, should not “want candidates pledging blind support for a nominee“ that could be “seriously problematic for the Republican Party.”

The former governor has been among the most vocal Trump critics, casting himself as a positive, forward-looking candidate for Republicans. But Hutchinson has struggled to gain much traction in early polls — coming in at less than 1 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average.

He also criticized the flood of media coverage of the former president’s various legal perils and said it has increased “the difficulty of candidates getting their voice heard in this environment.”

Hutchinson suspected that the classified information trial involving Trump would potentially not be resolved until after the 2024 election. He added that more charges could yet materialize against the former president in separate probes.

“You’re going to have the Georgia case, which in my judgment that telephone call was not ‘perfect,’” Hutchinson said, a reference to a now-infamous call first reported by The Washington Post in which Trump appealed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find'' more votes after the 2020 election. “You’ve got the special counsel on Jan. 6, as to how that comes out. And then you have multiple court appearances that he’s going to have to be at.”

In the interview, Hutchinson nodded to his previous experience serving in George W. Bush’s administration and his role as governor as something that set him apart from the GOP field. “No candidate has the breadth of experience that I have at the federal and state level; no candidate can compete in terms of the experience that I bring to the office of presidency.”

Hutchinson served as a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security and the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He also previously served in the House and as a U.S. attorney in Arkansas.

Hutchinson said that in talking to voters in early states, “whenever I go through that experience, it resonates.”

But, he added wistfully, “Experience historically has not been a winner of a campaign issue. But I think they’re returning to that, and it helped distinguish me.”