Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican serving in his second term, said he believes former President Donald Trump should drop out of the 2024 GOP presidential primary and that the federal charges Trump faces for his handling of classified documents “seems almost a slam dunk” for prosecutors.

“We may have a candidate for president who has been convicted of a crime,” Cassidy said of Trump, who has been indicted four times on 91 charges in three states and Washington, D.C., on CNN’s “State of the Union on Sunday. “I think Joe Biden needs to be replaced, but I don't think Americans will vote for someone who's been convicted. So I'm just very sorry about how all this is playing out.”

Cassidy added he would “vote for a Republican” when asked if he would support Trump if the former president secured the nomination. Trump currently holds an average lead of 40 percentage points in Republican primary polling, according to a polling average compiled by aggregator FiveThirtyEight.

“I think any Republican on that stage in Milwaukee will do a better job than Joe Biden,” he said of the other candidates in the race. “And so I want one of them to win. If former President Trump ends up getting the nomination, but cannot win a general election, that means we have four more years” of Biden’s policies.

Fixing Social Security is a key issue for Cassidy, arguing Biden and Trump’s policies were too similar for his tastes.

“Now my threshold issue, if you want to be a leader of our country, is to lead, and right now we need someone who will lead on that issue,” Cassidy said.

On Trump’s legal issues, Cassidy declined to opine on the Washington indictment on alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results or the state charges in New York and Georgia. But addressing the federal case in Miami, where Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith brought more than three dozen felony charges against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, Cassidy said it was “almost a slam dunk” and “a very strong case.”

Sunday is far from the first time Cassidy has criticized the former president. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Cassidy was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment.

“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty,” Cassidy said in a statement at the time.

The Louisiana Republican Party’s executive committee unanimously voted for Cassidy to be censured the same day.

Since then, Cassidy has repeatedly made it clear he doesn’t believe Trump to be a viable candidate to lead the party again, arguing that he was “the first president in the Republican side at least to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years,” in an interview with Axios in 2021.

And in May of this year, Cassidy told CNN, “I don’t think Trump can win a general election.”