While Joe Biden himself declined to comment on the verdict, his campaign sent out an email stating “no one is above the law”.
“In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law. Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” wrote Michael Tyler, Biden’s communications director.
“But today’s verdict does not change the fact that the American people face a simple reality. There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, said in a statement: “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.”
Read more on reactions to yesterday’s verdict:
A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist found that 67% of voters said a conviction would make no difference for them in November’s presidential election. Meanwhile, about 25% of Republicans said they would be even more likely to vote for Donald Trump if he were found guilty.
A Quinnipiac University national survey had similar findings, with 62% of voters saying a conviction would make no difference to how they were voting in November.
The Guardian’s David Smith has more here:
The campaign for Donald Trump was quick to fundraise off the back of the guilty verdict, with an email to his supporters declaring him a “political prisoner”.
The email questions whether “this is the end of America?” before saying that Trump had been convicted “in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG!”
Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that the Trump campaign is telling down ballot Republicans to back off of fundraising for themselves off the former president’s convictions – because they believe the trial to be a fundraising boon for the Trump campaign and don’t want other Republicans to siphon from the pot.
“Any Republican elected official, candidate or party committee siphoning money from President Trump’s donors are no better than Judge Merchan’s daughter,” Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita told Politico. “We’re keeping a list, we’ll be checking it twice and we aren’t in the spirit of Christmas.”
Trump’s team had long argued that judge Juan Merchan had a conflict of interest in overseeing the the trial because his daughter, Loren, is a political consultant whose firm has worked for prominent Democrats including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Judicial ethics experts and the New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics determined that her work for Democrats was not grounds for recusal.
As expected, Donald Trump reacted defiantly to a New York jury finding him guilty on 34 counts of felony falsification of business records.
“This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” Trump said at the courthouse after the verdict was read. “This was a rigged trial, a disgrace.”
He decried judge Juan Merchan for not allowing him a change of venue, and accused Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who brought the case against him, as “a Soros-backed D.A.” – while a financial link exists between Bragg and George Soros, the billionaire Democratic megadonor, Soros did not directly give money to Bragg’s campaign A spokesman for Soros previously told The New York Times that the two men had never met.
Trump maintained that he was a “very innocent man” and that “we didn’t do a thing wrong”.
“The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people,” Trump said. “They know what happened here. Everybody knows what happened here.”
Cheers – and moans – around New York in response to a jury finding Donald Trump guilty:
Donald Trump is set to be sentenced on 11 July, after being found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. While the decision rests entirely with Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing the case, experts say Trump is unlikely to receive prison time: the crime he has been found guilty of is a non-violent paper crime, and he is a first-time offender.
Either way, yesterday’s verdict does not disqualify him as a presidential candidate, nor does it bar him from again sitting in the Oval Office.
Read more here:
In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned against Hillary Clinton to chants of “lock her up”, threatening to appoint a special prosecutor to go after her for use of a personal email account while she was secretary of state (an FBI investigation that year deemed that while Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information, they should not face criminal charges).
After yesterday’s verdict, Clinton took the stage at the Vital Voices Global Festival in Washington with a broad smile. She doesn’t even say Trump’s name, but asked the audience: “Anything going on today?” The crowd responded with raucous cheers.
On Instagram, Clinton posted an image on Instagram of a mug with her cartoon outline sipping from a mug and the phrase “turns out she was right about everything” on it.
The guilty verdict made the front page of newspapers across the world – Donald Trump is now the first US president, former or current, to be convicted of a crime.
In New York, The New York Post – a tabloid that has long been loyal to Trump – decried the verdict as an injustice.
Meanwhile, the city’s paper of record, The New York Times, had this to say:
See more front pages here:
While Joe Biden himself declined to comment on the verdict, his campaign sent out an email stating “no one is above the law”.
“In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law. Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” wrote Michael Tyler, Biden’s communications director.
“But today’s verdict does not change the fact that the American people face a simple reality. There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
Ian Sams, spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, said in a statement: “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.”
Read more on reactions to yesterday’s verdict:
Good morning.
Yesterday, a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty of of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, an unprecedented moment in US history.
The former president has decried the trial as “rigged”, calling it a “disgrace”.
“Twelve everyday jurors vowed to make a decision based on the evidence and the law and the evidence and the law alone,” said Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. “Their deliberations led them to a unanimous conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant Donald J Trump is guilty.”
He added: “While this defendant might be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial and ultimately today this verdict in the same manner as every other case.”
We’ll have more updates and analysis as the day unfolds.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
