Former President Donald Trump said he feels some sympathy for his co-defendants in the Georgia elections case, saying their “lives are destroyed” by the criminal charges.

“Those people that have been so unfairly dragged into this, these are high-quality people who don’t even know why they were brought in,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax several hours after he was booked in a Georgia county jail.

“Those people have to be released. They have to be released from this horrible thing that they’re going through,” he added.

Trump is one of 19 defendants charged in a sprawling RICO indictment that accuses them of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 Georgia presidential election.

Trump also noted that some of his co-defendants “don’t have a lot of money, and some of them have almost nothing.”

The former president dodged a question about whether he sees his co-defendants as a “team.”

Trump is a billionaire, but he has not offered to contribute to the legal defense costs of the people charged alongside him in Georgia.

— Christina Wilkie

Trump has posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, for the first time since Jan. 8, 2021, when he was suspended from the site in the wake of the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

His new post: a picture of his mugshot above a caption reading “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and “NEVER SURRENDER!”

Trump was a prolific, habitual user of Twitter throughout his presidency. Elon Musk lifted Trump’s ban after he bought the social media platform for $44 billion.

But Trump, who had already invested in a Twitter-like alternative platform called Truth Social, has stayed away until now. His latest post on X was the same one he had shared earlier Thursday evening on Truth Social.