New York State Criminal Case Against Trump (71543-23)

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      Kamala Harris Expected to Blast Trump at Party Dinner in Michigan

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      In one of her first campaign appearances since former President Donald J. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records, Vice President Kamala Harris sharply criticized him on Saturday as a “cheater” who believes himself above the law and argued that he should be disqualified for the presidency.Ms. Harris, who headlined a state Democratic Party dinner in downtown Detroit, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s false claims that his trial, like the 2020 presidential election, was “rigged” and defended the judicial process behind his felony conviction.“Simply put, Donald Trump thinks he is above the law,” she said. “This should be disqualifying for anyone who wants to be president of the United States.”The speech on Saturday evening capped a day of campaigning across Michigan, a crucial battleground state. Ms. Harris was accompanied by the actress Octavia Spencer, attending a fund-raiser in Ann Arbor and stopping at a Black-owned bookstore in Ypsilanti.In Detroit, the vice president opened her speech with remarks about the war in Gaza. As she tried to describe the Biden administration’s monthslong efforts to negotiate a cease-fire deal, a protester stood up and shouted at her and was quickly removed from the ballroom. Ms. Harris’s response was stern: “I value and respect your voice, but I’m speaking right now.”She then continued her speech. “We have been working every day to bring an end to this conflict in a way that ensures Israel is secure, brings home all hostages, ends ongoing suffering for Palestinian people and ensures that Palestinians can enjoy their right to self-determination, dignity and freedom,” she said. “As President Biden said last week, it is time for this war to end.”Turning to the election, Ms. Harris, the former top prosecutor of California, accused Mr. Trump of attacking “the foundations of our justice system.” She said that the former president was convicted by a jury of 12 Americans who were selected in part by his defense team, and that his lawyers had a chance to present their side of the evidence.“You know why he complains? Because the reality is cheaters don’t like getting caught,” she said.A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The event took place in a key swing state with heightened stakes. President Biden won Michigan’s primary in February, 81 percent to 13 percent, prevailing over a movement that urged Democrats to vote “uncommitted” on the ballot in protest of his support for Israel. But more than 100,000 voters took that stance against him, among them progressives, young people and many in the state’s large and politically active Arab American community. Mr. Biden’s campaign has also been seeking to shore up its support among Black voters in cities like Detroit.Mr. Trump won Michigan by nearly 11,000 votes in 2016, and lost it to Mr. Biden by more than 150,000 votes in his 2020 re-election bid. Mr. Trump focused on the voting in Michigan in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. More

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      Trump Defends Vow to Prosecute Rivals, Saying ‘Sometimes Revenge Can Be Justified’

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has in recent days been escalating his suggestions that he could prosecute his political enemies if elected in November.In interviews broadcast on Thursday and earlier this week, Mr. Trump’s remarks demonstrated how he is trying to put his legal troubles on the ballot as a referendum on the American justice system and the rule of law. His allies in the Republican Party have also joined his calls for revenge prosecutions and other retaliatory measures against Democrats in response to his felony convictions by a jury in a New York court on 34 charges.Mr. Trump was offered several opportunities by sympathetic interviewers in recent days to clarify or walk back his previous statements. Mr. Trump instead defended his position, saying at points that “I don’t want to look naïve” and that “sometimes revenge can be justified.”Dr. Phil McGraw, the television host and a self-described donor to Mr. Trump’s campaign, brought up the former president’s previous statements in an interview that ran on Thursday and gave him an opportunity to say, as Dr. McGraw put it: “Enough is enough. Too much is too much. This is a race to the bottom, and it stops here. It stops now.”Mr. Trump initially responded, “I’m OK with that,” but then added, “Sometimes, I’m sure in certain moments I wouldn’t be, you know, when you go through what I’ve been through.”Then, when Dr. McGraw said that revenge and retribution were unhealthy for the country and that Mr. Trump did not have time to “get even,” the former president replied: “Revenge does take time. I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified Phil, I have to be honest — sometimes it can.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Goes After Trump’s Felon Status at Connecticut Fund-Raiser

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      Democrats had been clamoring for the president to ratchet up his criticism of his predecessor.President Biden, prodded by Democrats to confront former President Donald J. Trump head-on about Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction in his New York hush-money case, heeded those calls on Monday night during a big-dollar fund-raiser in Connecticut for his re-election campaign and for the party.Mr. Biden railed against his rival at a reception in Greenwich, telling a group of supporters who included Connecticut’s governor and its two sitting U.S. senators that the campaign had entered “unchartered territory” when a jury on Thursday found Mr. Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts that he had been facing.He said Mr. Trump had cemented the distinction of being the first former president and convicted felon to seek the Oval Office.“But as disturbing as that is, more damaging is the all-out assault Donald Trump is making on the American system of justice,” Mr. Biden said, according to a pool reporter covering the event.Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump “unhinged” and said he was undermining another democratic institution with his vitriol after the verdict.“It’s reckless and dangerous for anyone to say that’s rigged just because they don’t like the outcome,” he said.A spokesman for the Trump campaign, responding to a request for comment on Monday night, attacked Mr. Biden in a statement and said the president was trying to divert attention from the federal gun charge trial of his son, Hunter, that opened on Monday.Mr. Biden’s bluster at the reception, hosted by Richard Plepler, the former chief executive of HBO, was a notable shift in his approach to Mr. Trump’s conviction by a Manhattan jury.When asked on Friday by reporters at the White House about the verdict, Mr. Biden grinned and walked away silently after making remarks about the war in Gaza. His reluctance to weigh in on the issue tracked with his general strategy to avoid personally engaging Mr. Trump about his legal woes.Mr. Biden’s remarks at the fund-raiser echoed portions of a televised statement at the White House on Friday before he outlined his administration’s latest efforts to end the war between Israel and Hamas. Still, Democrats had called for him to be more aggressive.Mr. Trump’s offender status was not the only line of attack for Mr. Biden during the fund-raiser.Mr. Biden brought up the time when Mr. Trump suggested during a White House coronavirus briefing four years ago that bleach could be used to treat the disease, medical advice that was instantly debunked.“He must have injected it into his brain,” Mr. Biden said, according to a pool report. More

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      After Trump’s Conviction, a National Enquirer Editor Sends His Regrets

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      For Barry Levine, a former top journalist at the supermarket tabloid, the former president’s trial was its own kind of tear-jerker.Even before former President Donald J. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal, a verdict was being delivered on The National Enquirer.The no-holds-barred supermarket tabloid was once famous for publishing salacious stories about celebrities and politicians. Now it may be better known for suppressing them.“It’s just a tragedy for the paper,” said Barry Levine, the publication’s former executive editor, sitting in the living room of his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on a recent morning.Was he being overly dramatic? Perhaps.Even among those who consider it a guilty pleasure, The Enquirer can hardly be described as a national treasure. But try telling that to Mr. Levine, a swashbuckling journalist who worked there from 1999 until 2016 and whose professional and personal identity was shaped by it.“I grew up with the romantic vision of ‘The Front Page,’ the press cards and hats, the larger than life personalities of Fleet Street reporters who did whatever they had to do to get the story,” Mr. Levine said. “I was in love with that type of journalism — and I found it at The National Enquirer.”Mr. Levine at his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Trump’s Speech After His Guilty Verdict Was All Business, No Politics

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      In his post-verdict remarks, the former president sounded less like a political martyr than like a motorist trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket.The way to evaluate a political speech — I mean as a literary critic, not as a pundit or a partisan — is to examine how the rhetoric rises to the occasion. Does the moment demand gravity or transcendence? Humility or defiance? Do the speaker’s words answer the call of history?In the case of Donald J. Trump’s 33-minute address in the lobby of Trump Tower on Friday, the occasion was both bizarre and momentous. A former president on the brink of becoming, for the third time in a row, the nominee of his party, stood convicted of 34 felonies. That nothing remotely similar has ever happened before is sufficient to guarantee the speech a place in the annals of American political discourse.As text and performance, though, the thing was kind of a slog. Mr. Trump has never been an orderly orator or a methodical builder of arguments; he riffs and extemporizes, free-associates and repeats himself, straying from whatever script may be at hand. He did some of that on Friday, but his manner was subdued. The matter was also curiously flat: a rehash of the trial, with a few gestures toward the larger political stakes.The persona Mr. Trump presented on Friday was that of an aggrieved New York businessman — a Trump that seemed like a throwback to an earlier, pre-MAGA era. He didn’t sound like a candidate in campaign mode. The showboating populism that he brings to his rallies — the mix of piety and profanity that gets the crowds going — was hardly in evidence.It’s true that he began and ended with familiar tropes and themes, painting a grim picture of a declining, crime-ridden American overrun by foreigners (some speaking languages “that we haven’t even heard of”). He framed his legal troubles as an assault on the Constitution and used religious imagery to depict what had happened in the courtroom. Some witnesses were “literally crucified” by the judge, Juan Merchan, “who looks like an angel, but he’s really a devil.”As a longtime journalist (and lifelong pedant), I’m compelled to point out that nobody was literally crucified. And as a student of Renaissance love poetry, I’m tempted to linger over Mr. Trump’s oddly tender description of the “highly conflicted” judge: “He looks so nice and soft.” A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America’s streets, of Little League ball fields swamped by migrant encampments, of “record levels of terrorists” flooding the country.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Trump’s Most Loyal Supporters Are Responding to the Verdict

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      Many saw in the jury’s finding a rejection of themselves, of their values and even of democracy itself. The sense of grievance erupted as powerfully as the verdict itself.From the low hills of northwest Georgia to a veterans’ retreat in Alaska to suburban New Hampshire, the corners of conservative America resounded with anger over the New York jury’s declaration that former President Donald J. Trump was guilty.But their discontent was about more than the 34 felony counts that Mr. Trump was convicted on, which his supporters quickly dismissed as politically motivated.They saw in the jury’s finding a rejection of themselves, and the values they believed their nation should uphold. Broad swaths of liberal America may have found long-awaited justice in the trial’s outcome. But for many staunch Trump loyalists — people who for years have listened to and believed Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the system is rigged against him, and them — the verdict on Thursday threatened to shatter their faith in democracy itself.“We are at that crossroads. The democracy that we have known and cherished in this nation is now threatened,” Franklin Graham, the evangelist, said in an interview from Alaska. “I’ve got 13 grandchildren. What kind of nation are we leaving them?”Echoing him was Marie Vast, 72, of West Palm Beach, Fla., near Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. “I know a lot of people who say they still believe in our government,” she said, “but when the Democrats can manipulate things this grossly, and use the legal system as a tool to get the outcome they want, the system isn’t working.”Among more than two dozen people interviewed across 10 states on Friday, the sentiments among conservatives were so strong that they echoed the worry and fear that many progressives described feeling after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade almost two years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Trump, a Deflating Blow, and Then a Bounce Back

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      A day after Donald J. Trump left the courthouse shellshocked, he emerged on his home turf revitalized and railing against his rivals.The Donald J. Trump who emerged from a drab courtroom in Lower Manhattan yesterday afternoon did so glumly, shuffling into the hallway to speak for less than two minutes. He seemed, like much of the nation, to be still absorbing the gut punch of his conviction on 34 felony charges.That was Desultory Donald.Nineteen hours later, it was a different Donald J. Trump who held forth for 33 minutes from a lectern in the lobby of the tower that bears his name. He’d slept on it, and things turned out not to be all bad, he seemed to suggest. “Let me give you the good news,” he said, picking up a piece of paper to read out the campaign’s boffo fund-raising numbers since the verdict came down ($39 million in 10 hours, he said).“Does anybody read The Daily Mail?” he asked at one point. It had apparently published a new poll that “has Trump up six points in the last 12 hours,” he chirped. “Who thought this could happen?”Americans were still processing the jolting news of Mr. Trump’s conviction on Friday. But Mr. Trump himself, a candidate of unusual personality and sometimes impenetrable psyche, seemed to be willing himself forward, moving from downcast to defiant within a day.It helped that he was back in his marble bunker, surrounded by creature comforts. Eric and Lara Trump, his son and daughter-in-law, stood behind a red velvet rope with dozens of supporters (many of whom work in the building). Employees at the Gucci store in the building’s lobby pressed their faces against the glass pane, agog at the spectacle. Secret Service agents pushed their fingers into their earpieces. New York City police officers milled around in their caps and starched white shirts. A doorman in a three-piece suit and a bow tie watched with interest. A forest of cameras and lighting rigs pointed toward Mr. Trump.Outside, a “Trump or Death 2024” flag, roughly the size of a Honda Civic, billowed in front of the Prada store across the avenue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Trump and American Justice

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      Readers offer a range of reactions and reflections.To the Editor:Re “Guilty: Jury Convicts Trump on All 34 Counts” (front page, May 31):I was overcome with a sense of giddiness on Thursday afternoon as I walked through Manhattan and news broke that former President Donald Trump had been convicted on 34 felony counts.I was glued to the live news updates on my phone, and soon enough messages began pouring in from like-minded friends who shared my sense of satisfaction that the justice system is alive and well, and that the verdict showed us that no one is above the law.Nonetheless, it took mere minutes before a more sober reality set in, and I contemplated how the verdict will likely play into the strategic hands of Mr. Trump’s campaign, energizing his ardent supporters, perhaps even working in his favor among some sympathetic swing voters.That so many of us find that morally offensive and reprehensible, while so many of our fellow Americans simply do not, reaffirms how deeply and dangerously divided this country truly is.Cody LyonBrooklynTo the Editor:Our system of laws has spoken. A jury of his peers found Donald Trump guilty on all counts in what was supposed to be the weakest of the criminal cases against the former president.Unfortunately, our Constitution does not prohibit a convicted felon from running for president; it even allows an elected candidate who has been criminally convicted to govern, even from prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More