COLUMBUS, GA. — Donald Trump’s legal defense did not start in a courtroom. It began on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.

After his historic federal indictment, the former president stepped onstage Saturday in front of more than 2,000 people packed into a convention center here to once again declare his innocence and deliver a grievance-laced takedown of what he said was a biased federal law enforcement apparatus.

“In the end, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump said.

“The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country,” he said. “Many people have said that; Democrats have even said it. This vicious persecution is a travesty of justice.”

His remarks at the Georgia Republican Party’s annual conference came one day after special counsel Jack Smith unsealed a 37-count federal indictment against Trump for allegedly crafting a scheme to keep in his possession sensitive material from his time in the White House, even though he knew many remained classified. The indictment alleged that Trump not only withheld classified documents but lied to federal agents and investigators about his involvement.

Those charges, which bring the prospect of an ex-president spending the rest of his life in a prison cell, hung over those gathered in the Columbus Convention and Trade Center to conduct their annual state party business. The event was relatively procedural, aside from Trump.

Trump repeatedly mocked the indictment. He called Smith “deranged” and said the Justice Department was a “sick nest of people that need to be cleaned out.”

“They took one charge and made it 37,” Trump said. “It’s a political hit job.”

The crowd, some carrying signs that read “The FBI is the DNC for the KGB,” was friendly toward Trump, even in a state that Joe Biden won and whose Republican governor, Brian Kemp, beat a Trump-backed challenger during the 2022 midterms.

Several in attendance wore stickers with a red line over the words “voting machines,” signaling they thought the 2020 election had been stolen.

Kemp and most of Georgia’s statewide elected officials were missing from the event. Raffensperger told Fox News Saturday afternoon their absence was by design. He said statewide office holders had not been invited.

Amid the firestorm, Trump’s campaign is pushing forward in anticipation of getting a bump in the polls, as he did briefly in September after federal agents searched his Mar-a-Lago home as part of the classified documents investigation, and again in March when Trump was indicted in New York on allegations that he falsified business records connected to hush money he paid to allegedly cover up affairs before the 2016 presidential election.