Former President Trump’s unprecedented conviction opens a dark chapter in the history of the U.S. criminal justice system, according to multiple legal experts.
A New York jury on Thursday found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in what prosecutors described as a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election, making him the first former president to be convicted of a crime. His sentence is scheduled for July 11 and could mean prison time.
Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, was among those who called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump a “total travesty.” He warned Friday that if Trump cannot achieve justice in New York through the appellate process, Republican prosecutors could target Democrats in heavily Republican districts.
“This is the beginning of a war on the weaponization of the criminal justice system,” Derschotz said on Fox Business’ “Mornings with Maria.” “The justice system has failed. The great contribution of the American Constitution, the system of checks and balances, failed yesterday.”
Trump’s NY ruling comes four days before the Republican National Convention
Former President Donald Trump appears in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, Thursday, May 30, 2024. A jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Trump’s critics will say this dire warning is at best exaggerated and at worst dangerous. They argue that Trump’s historic conviction was handed down by a jury of his peers in a court where Trump was presumed innocent until proven guilty, no matter how outlandish the charges.
“This is a guilty verdict by an American jury that heard the evidence and reached a verdict,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in comments to The New York Times. “If we undermine the courts just as our elections are already undermined, there is no way to peacefully resolve differences.”
Trump and many of his supporters argue the opposite: that it is the result of an explicitly political prosecution brought by Bragg, a Democrat who campaigned on the promise of “getting Trump,” presided over by Judge Juan Marchan (who previously donated $35 to an anti-Trump political committee), and held in a county where only 12% of jury-eligible residents voted for Trump in 2020.
“From day one, everything was rigged, from the venue to the judge,” Trump said in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman after the verdict. He has maintained his innocence and accused President Biden and Democrats of trying to use the justice system to damage his presidential campaign.
Trump found guilty on all charges in New York criminal trial
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks during a press conference in New York on May 30, 2024, following the conviction in the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump, who was charged with falsifying business records to hide money paid in 2016 to silence porn actress Stormy Daniels. (Reuters/Brendan McDiarmid)
“He did not get a fair trial,” he said. “It’s a sad day for New York and for the country.”
Bragg denied any political motivation for the successful prosecution against Trump and said his office “did its job” to “follow the facts and the law without fear or favoritism”.
“The only opinion that matters is the one from the jury, and the jury spoke their mind,” Bragg said Thursday night.
But Staten Island criminal lawyer Louis Germolino said Bragg and other Democratic leaders who made prosecuting Trump a campaign promise should never have been allowed to move forward with the case.
“Letitia James, Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg campaigned to beat Trump. They all got elected and they went after Trump. All of them, everyone in office, should have resigned because of what they said on the campaign trail,” Gelormino said, referring to New York Attorney General Letitia James and Atlanta’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
I was in the courtroom when the judge closed the Trump trial. What I saw was shocking: Alan Dershowitz
Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump reacts as the verdict is read in his criminal trial on charges he falsified business records to hide payments made to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, at state court in Manhattan, New York City, on May 30, 2024. In this courtroom sketch, (Reuters/Jane Rosenberg)
Before his 2018 election, James called Trump a “con man” and a “carnival barker” and promised to “shine a bright light on all the dark corners of real estate.” She successfully prosecuted the Trump Organization for fraud and falsely inflating the values of its properties. Trump and his lawyers argued that Trump never instructed anyone to inflate the property values and that no one was harmed, even if there were discrepancies.
Willis has filed a lawsuit against Trump and 14 co-conspirators for allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. After his Democratic primary victory in March, he told Trump and his co-conspirators, “The train is coming.”
“It’s absolutely clear that they are using the law to try to stop Trump from running for office,” said Gelorminho, who criticized New York District Attorney Laura Bragg’s decision to prosecute, saying the district attorney has been soft on violent crimes while aggressively pursuing Trump.
“In Manhattan, if you sell a lot of drugs, at best they don’t prosecute you or they don’t put you in a program. In Manhattan you get arrested for all kinds of crimes but they try to reduce your sentence. But Bragg is tough on white-collar crime and we see every day that street crime, violent crime and drugs go unchecked. He does it because that’s not his constituency,” he said.
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New Jersey resident David Gelman said: Criminal Lawyer Former Assistant District Attorney John McCain said anyone who looks at how the Trump case was handled in New York and doesn’t think it was “weaponized” against Trump is “lying to themselves.”
“This is the first time an individual has been tried in New York for this type of crime. Is it a coincidence that this is happening during a presidential election with President Trump as the front-runner?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”
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He noted that the Federal Election Commission, the Department of Justice, the Southern District of New York and Bragg’s predecessor all previously declined to indict Trump because they believed there was insufficient evidence of a crime.
“The problem now is that it’s becoming commonplace to prosecute your opponents in order to make them unable to win elections,” he warned. “This makes us no different from countries like Russia or China.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
