Former President Donald Trump on Friday morning responded to his felony conviction for falsifying business records in New York, saying the trial was “very unfair” and said his team will appeal the case.
“If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” he said. “These are bad people ... these are sick people.”
On multiple occasions, President Trump was critical of the judge overseeing the case, at one point citing his admonishment of one of the Trump team’s witnesses, Robert Costello.
The former president also criticized the “nasty gag order” that was handed down by Judge Juan Merchan, who earlier this month threatened to put him in jail and alleged that the White House was involved. “There’s never been anybody who is so conflicted,” he said.
“We have a DA who is a failed DA,” he said in reference to District Attorney Alvin Bragg, adding that “crime is rampant in New York.”
The former president also turned his attention to the illegal immigration crisis, saying that the current administration isn’t stopping the flow of illegal migration, among other campaign-related issues.
“This is a scam. This is a rigged trial ... this is a rigged judge,” President Trump said, adding that a specific election expert wasn’t allowed to testify on certain matters related to the trial.
Referring to allegations that were made by pornographic performer Stormy Daniels about a 2006 affair at the center of the case, President Trump said that “nothing happened ... and they know it.”
“It had nothing to do with a case, but it had to do with politics,” President Trump said, likely referring to the Daniels testimony.
The Biden campaign responded to President Trump’s speech, saying that the presumed GOP nominee is “consumed by his own thirst for revenge and retribution.”
Campaign Haul
Hours after the former president was convicted, his campaign confirmed in a statement that it raised tens of millions of dollars.“From just minutes after the sham trial verdict was announced, our digital fundraising system was overwhelmed with support, and despite temporary delays online because of the amount of traffic, President Trump raised $34.8 million dollars from small-dollar donors,” Trump campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a joint statement issued on Friday.
His campaign donation webpage crashed on Thursday evening, said his campaign in a social media post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“The American people see through Crooked Joe Biden’s rigged show trial,” the post read. “So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down. We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible.”
A number of Republican officials, including some who have opposed the former president in the past, came to his defense and were critical of the case. That included Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who said that “the charges should never have been brought in the first place,” adding he believes the “conviction will be overturned on appeal.:
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who voted to convict President Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial, criticized the prosecution for being politically motivated.
“It is fundamental to our American system of justice that the government prosecutes cases because of alleged criminal conduct regardless of who the defendant happens to be. In this case the opposite has happened. The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct,” Ms. Collins said in a statement Thursday evening.
She added that there are “political underpinnings” that will likely “blur the lines between the judicial system and the electoral system, and this verdict likely will be the subject of a protracted appeals process.”
As for Democrats, his 2024 opponent, President Joe Biden, released a statement saying that “no one is above the law.”
“The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater. He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on day one’ and calling for our Constitution to be ’terminated' so he can regain and keep power,” the statement added. “A second Trump term means chaos, ripping away Americans’ freedoms and fomenting political violence—and the American people will reject it this November.”
After the conviction was handed down on Thursday evening, Judge Merchan set the sentencing date for July 11, or four days before the start of the Republican National Convention. President Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee for president.
Incarceration would not prevent President Trump from campaigning, or taking office if he were to win during the November election. He also will not be jailed ahead of his sentencing.
After two days of deliberation, a jury of New Yorkers found President Trump guilty of all 34 criminal counts he faced for falsifying documents to cover up payments to Ms. Daniels in the final days of his successful 2016 campaign. The former president pleaded not guilty, denied allegations from Ms. Daniels about an affair, and said the payments were standard legal expenses.
Falsifying business documents is normally a misdemeanor in New York, but prosecutors in District Attorney Bragg’s office elevated the case to a felony on grounds that President Trump was concealing an illegal campaign contribution. The former president was not charged with any crimes related to the alleged illegal, election-related contributions.
He still faces three other criminal prosecutions, but the New York verdict could be the only one handed down before Americans vote as the other cases have been tied up in legal wrangling. President Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four cases, which he says are politically motivated.
“If this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone,” he posted on social media, describing the New York trial as “rigged.”
National opinion polls show President Trump locked in a tight race with President Joe Biden, and one in four Republican respondents in an April Reuters-Ipsos poll said they would not vote for him if he were convicted of a felony by a jury.
