Former US President Donald Trump was found guilty on Thursday of falsifying business records, with a Manhattan jury agreeing that this normally minor offense influenced the 2016 election. Trump has condemned the result of the “rigged trial” and vowed to appeal.
How did Trump end up in court? Trump stood accused of ordering his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to mislabel $130,000 worth of ‘hush-money’ payments to porn star Stormy Daniels as “legal expenses.”
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Prosecutors argued that this bookkeeping decision amounted to “election fraud,” as the disclosure of these payments could have negatively influenced the 2016 election.
The case was dismissed as legally unsound by the Southern District of New York in 2021 and by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in 2022. However, Bragg reversed his earlier decision and brought the case in 2023, four months after Trump announced his 2024 election campaign.
How was the case unique? Falsification of business records is typically a misdemeanor-level offense in New York, punishable by a fine. However, Bragg elevated the charges to felonies, arguing that Trump falsified the records in a bid to violate federal election laws. Generally, state-level courts do not have the jurisdiction to try federal crimes.
Trump was slapped with 34 separate charges, one for each individual document referring to a payment to Daniels.
The former president spent much of the six-week trial under a gag order, which barred him from publicly criticizing prosecutors, jurors, or witnesses – including Cohen and Daniels. Trump repeatedly condemned this order, calling it “unconstitutional” and arguing that the entire trial – during which he was forbidden from calling certain witnesses – was a Democrat-orchestrated plot to derail his re-election campaign.
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What did the jury decide? After two days of deliberation, the jury unanimously found Trump guilty on all 34 counts, making him the first former president in US history to be convicted of a felony.
Will Trump be jailed? Trump said on Friday that he would appeal the verdict, although he will have to wait until after his sentencing on July 11 to do so. If his appeal fails, the former president could face a four year prison sentence for each count, capped at a maximum of 20 years.
Whether Trump is imprisoned or not, the conviction will not prevent him from contesting this November’s election. There is no legal prohibition on convicted felons seeking office, and Trump told former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson last year that he would not drop out of the race if he were convicted of a crime.
How have Trump’s allies and opponents reacted? While some Republican politicians and pundits urged their followers to respect the outcome of the trial, the verdict was widely condemned on the right. Trump’s donation website crashed due to high traffic on Thursday evening, and the former president revealed on Friday that his campaign took in a record $39 million in contributions from small donors in the ten hours after he was convicted.
The verdict was celebrated in Democrat circles, and US President Joe Biden released a statement declaring that “In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law.” According to media reports, the White House instructed staffers not to share their personal opinions on the verdict on social media, for fear of playing into Trump’s claims that the case was “all done by Biden and his people.”
According to a snap poll published by the Daily Mail on Thursday, the conviction scored Trump a six-point bump in his approval rating among voters who said the case would influence their opinion of the former president.
