NEW YORK - Former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump faces his sentencing July 11.
President Joe Biden made remarks May 31, in regard to Trump's convictions. Biden began defending the process of the courts saying, "The justice system should be respected and we shouldn't allow anyone to tear it down."
Following this, Biden took the opportunity to express a sense of urgency for Israel and Hamas to accept a newly proposed ceasefire deal on the war in the Middle East.
"Now it's time to raise your voices and demand that they must come to the table and agree to the deal and end this war that they began," said Biden. "Even as we work to service assistance to Gaza with 1,800 trucks delivering supplies these last five days, the humanitarian crisis still remains."
At a press conference Friday, Trump claimed to have wanted to testify during the New York hush money trial and continued to repeat unfounded claims that President Joe Biden and the Justice Department influenced the prosecution. However, according to AP, the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a state-level prosecutor and operates independently, not under the direction of Biden or the federal government.
Immediately following the guilty verdict Thursday, Trump referred to the trial as a "disgrace" and said that "the real verdict will be in November by the people."
Trump continued to say that this "was a rigged decision right from day one with a conflicted judge." This brings a seven week trial to an end. This was the first criminal trial of a former president in American history.
U.S. Senator Chris Coons, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put out this statement following the release of the guilty verdict.
"This verdict reaffirms the basic principle that no one is above the law, not even a former president. A jury unanimously determined that former President Trump’s hush money payments were deliberately disguised – at his direction – to keep voters in the dark during the 2016 election. I commend the jurors for their service and urge all Americans, no matter their party affiliation, to accept and respect the outcome of this trial."
Trump faces three other pending criminal cases. In two of those cases, he is charged with crimes related to overturning his loss in the 2020 election against President Joe Biden, according to NBC.
One of those cases is in federal court in Washington, D.C., and the other is in Georgia state court in Atlanta.
In Florida, NBC said Trump is charged in federal court with crimes related to his retention of classified government records after he left the White House in January 2021 and his attempts to prevent those documents from being recovered by federal officials.
According to NBC, civil judgment also falls under Trump's name in Manhattan Supreme Court, ordering him to pay more than $450 million in damages to the state of New York. That comes after he was first held liable for business fraud involving the Trump Organization and its valuation of real estate assets.
The former president has also faced two civil defamation verdicts by federal juries that awarded damages of nearly $90 million. Those damage went to writer E. Jean Carroll. Carroll had testified that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s in a dressing room of a Manhattan department store, said NBC.
Trump is appealing the verdicts in the three civil cases.