Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who rebuffed pressure from then-President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in his state, said this week he was interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith’s team as part of their criminal investigation into Trump’s election subversion efforts.

Trump has been charged with four felony counts federal court in connection to those efforts and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to violate Americans’ civil rights. The first president to face criminal prosecution in U.S. history pleaded not guilty in August and is currently making the case to the Supreme Court that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecutions.

“I basically told them the same thing I told the special grand juries: that I followed the law and the Constitution and answered all their questions truthfully,” Kemp said on CNN’s “The Source” in an interview that aired on Tuesday night. He noted the sit-down was “months ago” and “really didn’t last that long,” but couldn’t say exactly when it occurred.

“I don't think anybody's above the law, you know, a Democrat or Republican, independent, myself or anybody else. So that's my personal opinion,” he later added when asked about the former president’s immunity claim.

Kemp previously testified in front of a grand jury in the Georgia criminal investigation into Trump’s election interference actions. The 2024 GOP frontrunner was charged in Fulton County in a racketeering case along with 18 co-defendants and pleaded not guilty. Four of the former president’s co-defendants have pleaded guilty in the case and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

Kemp resisted the direct urging by the leader of his country and his party in the form of a phone call from Trump on Dec. 5, 2020, about a month after the election and in the heat of a campaign by Trump and his allies to keep the White House despite losing to now-President Joe Biden. Kemp’s office confirmed at the time Trump called the governor to pressure him to call a special session of his state’s legislature and order a signature audit of absentee ballots.

That day, Trump swore “Republicans will NEVER forget” Kemp’s resistance to his extralegal requests and the former president has been antagonistic to the Georgia governor ever since.

Despite the animosity, Kemp remains popular in his state -- an Emerson College/The Hill poll released Wednesday found only 29% of Georgians disapprove of his job performance -- and he beat a Trump-backed challenger, former Sen. David Perdue, by more than 50 percentage points in the 2022 gubernatorial primary on his way to an easy reelection victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams, who he only narrowly beat four years prior.

But the party has largely embraced Trump despite his criminal prosecutions and efforts to undermine the country’s democratic system, and despite Kemp’s appeals otherwise. Trump has pushed all but one of his major rivals out of the 2024 GOP primary and polling suggests he will soon all but ensure victory over his former U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley.

The Georgia governor ruled out a presidential run of his own last summer and has not endorsed any candidate, though he said at the time he would support the eventual nominee, even if it was Trump.

“We need candidates… to be focused on the future, to be telling the American people what we're for, why they should vote for us, not why the other person is so bad,” Kemp said in the Tuesday interview. “There's plenty of bad things, in my opinion, about Joe Biden and the way he's governed the country, but I also think you got to give people a reason to vote for you.”

The Georgia Republican expressed some skepticism about Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution, which has been disrupted by accusations she had an improper financial and romantic relationship with a subordinate. Kemp suggested both the prosecution and the allegations of misconduct were motivated by politics.

“I got to be very careful about what I'm saying here, because as you know, I was subpoenaed to be a witness in that grand jury,” he said. “But I've been very concerned about that being a political process. And I think now, Fani Willis is seeing how political it can get on the other side.”

Speaking to all four of Trump’s criminal cases, Kemp said he believed they would go to trial before the November election and had no objection to the idea of prosecutions playing out before voters had their say.

“I think most voters probably feel the same way I do. I mean, we're a country that was built on laws and the Constitution,” he said. “It is up to us really as elected leaders to be the ones that exemplify that in a lot of ways. So we’ll see where the process plays out.”