Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has steadfastly refused to comment on the presidential election or his long-running feud with former President Trump, defended Trump on Thursday night.
Hours after the jury returned its guilty verdict, McConnell declared Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should never have brought the case and predicted the conviction would be overturned.
“These charges should never have been filed in the first place, and we hope the convictions will be overturned on appeal,” McConnell wrote in a social media post on X.
McConnell’s surprising decision to comment on the outcome of the trial after refusing to discuss it for months may signal that convicting Trump could have a unifying effect within the Republican Party, rallying even the party’s most skeptics to Trump’s defence.
McConnell has remained silent on other key occasions, leaving Trump at a mercy.
The Senate Republican leader was notably silent when President Trump pleaded not guilty last April to the 34 felony charges brought against Bragg.
The big difference between then and now is that Republicans who weren’t Trump supporters a year ago were hopeful that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or another Republican might win the presidential nomination.
Instead, Trump is likely to crush his opponents in this year’s primaries and become the Republican nominee.
But the party is struggling to unite after a sizable percentage of Republican primary voters in Indiana and other states cast their ballots for former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the presidential race in March.
Thursday’s ruling could push skeptical mainstream Republicans closer to Trump.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a moderate Senate Republican who voted in favor of impeaching President Trump for inciting the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, criticized Sen. Bragg on Thursday for pursuing a politically motivated prosecution.
“It is a cornerstone of our American justice system that the government prosecutes cases for alleged criminal conduct, regardless of who the defendant is. In this case, the opposite has happened: a District Attorney who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump brought these charges precisely because of who the defendants are, not any specific criminal conduct,” Collins said in a statement Thursday night.
“The political context of this case further blurs the lines between the judicial and electoral systems, and the decision is likely to be subject to a lengthy appeals process,” she said.
Senators McConnell and Collins were two of the most Trump skeptics in the Senate Republican Conference, sharply criticizing Bragg’s decision to indict former President Trump, but other Republican senators who are not particularly close to Trump also rallied to his defense.
“I was on the plane and just landed and saw the news. This case has been politically motivated from the beginning, and today’s sentence does not absolve this prosecution of the partisan nature of the prosecution,” said Senate Republican Leader John Thune of South Dakota, who opposed Trump’s efforts to block the certification of Joe Biden’s 2021 electoral victory and whom Trump later sought to end his career in retaliation.
President Trump tried to field a conservative primary candidate to oust Thune from office in 2022, but the effort failed.
After news of the verdict broke on Thursday, Toon seemed to have put all past bad feelings behind him.
“Whatever the outcome, more and more Americans realize that four more years of a Joe Biden administration are intolerable. With President Trump in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, we can finally end the Biden-Schumer Administration’s disastrous policies that are ruining American families and businesses,” Thune said following the verdict.
Shortly after McConnell criticized the successful prosecution of Trump, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York issued his own rebuttal.
“No one is above the law. The ruling speaks for itself,” Schumer said in a brief statement.
