Foreign
The jury’s verdict is the first time a former president has been convicted of a crime.
By Adam Reiss, Gary Grumbach, Dareh Gregorian, Tom Winter and Jillian Frankel
A New York jury on Thursday found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — the first time a former U.S. president has been convicted of a crime.
The jury reached its verdict in the historic case after 9½ hours of deliberations, which began Wednesday.
He’ll be sentenced on July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention. He faces penalties from a fine to four years in prison on each count, although it’s expected he would be sentenced for the offenses concurrently, not consecutively.
“This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” Trump fumed to reporters afterward.
The verdict was read in the Manhattan courtroom where Trump has been on trial since April 15. He had pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment his former lawyer Michael Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election.
Trump looked down with his eyes narrowed as the jury foreperson read the word “guilty” to each count.
The judge thanked the jurors for their service in the weekslong trial. “You gave this matter the attention it deserved, and I want to thank you for that,” Judge Juan Merchan told them. Trump appeared to be scowling at the jurors as they walked by him on their way out of the courtroom.
Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche made a motion for acquittal after the jury left the room, which the judge denied.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would not comment on what type of sentence he might seek, saying his office would do its talking in court papers.
“While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial and ultimately today at this verdict in the same manner as every other case that comes to the courtroom doors — by following the facts and the law in doing so, without fear or favor,” Bragg said. Asked for his reaction to the verdict, Bragg, who was inundated with threats from Trump supporters during the probe, said, “I did my job. We did our job.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, immediately set out fundraising off the news, posting on his website that he’s “a political prisoner” and urging his followers to give money.
Legal experts have told NBC News that even if Trump is sentenced to time behind bars, he’d most likely be allowed to remain out of jail while he appeals the verdict, a process that could take months or more. That means the sentence would most likely not interfere with his ability to accept the Republican nomination for president at the July convention.
And it likely wouldn’t impact his ability to be elected. “There are no other qualifications other than those in the Constitution,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney and NBC News & MSNBC Legal Analyst said following Thursday’s verdict.
President Joe Biden’s campaign praised the verdict in a statement but stressed that Trump needs to be defeated in November.
“In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law,” said the campaign’s communications director, Michael Tyler, but the “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.”
In his closing argument this week, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told the jury that “the law is the law, and it applies to everyone equally. There is no special standard for this defendant.”( Credit: NBC News)
F.A
May 31, 2024
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