NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) – Former President Donald Trump’s conviction Thursday on 34 counts of allegedly falsifying business records pertaining to “hush money” payments to pornographic “actress” Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford has set the political world on fire, eliciting numerous condemnations of the prosecution and trial from people who otherwise differ in their view of the Republican presidential nominee himself.

Daniels first alleged the 2006 affair in 2011, when Trump was a private citizen. Trump has consistently denied the claim. Daniels signed a statement in 2018 that the affair “never happened,” but later claimed her attorney and business manager pressured her into recanting. The allegations resurfaced in 2018, halfway through Trump’s presidency, with the added revelation that Trump attorney Michael Cohen arranged a $130,000 payment to Daniels to keep quiet about it in October 2016, a month before Trump was elected.

Left-wing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump over that payment in March 2023, claiming it was a campaign expenditure not recorded as such in payments to Cohen listed as “legal expenses” in 2017. Trump was convicted Thursday on all 34 counts, one for each of 34 invoices, ledger entries, and checks related to Cohen’s $420,000 in payments. Sentencing begins July 11, where the former president could face fines, probation, or potentially up to four years in prison. He is expected to appeal.

Trump continued to assail the verdict at a press conference on Friday morning, calling the presiding Judge Juan Merchan “highly conflicted,” condemning President Joe Biden’s “bunch of fascists,” and warning, “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone.”

Numerous Trump allies and other conservatives have spoken out in opposition to the verdict, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who called it the “culmination of a legal process that has been bent to the political will of the actors involved” by a prosecutor who “routinely excuses criminal conduct in a way that has endangered law-abiding citizens in his jurisdiction”; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who called Thursday a “dark day for America”; businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who predicted the case “will backfire”; and Live Action founder Lila Rose, who said there is “no better way to galvanize moderates against you than run a politically motivated prosecution when you’re in power in an attempt to quash your opponent.”

Today’s verdict represents the culmination of a legal process that has been bent to the political will of the actors involved: a leftist prosecutor, a partisan judge and a jury reflective of one of the most liberal enclaves in America—all in an effort to “get” Donald Trump.

That…

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) May 30, 2024

Indeed, great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system.

If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter – motivated by politics, rather than justice – then anyone is at risk of a similar fate. https://t.co/zrHCyIZazh

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2024

X owner Elon Musk lamented that “great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system. If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter – motivated by politics, rather than justice – then anyone is at risk of a similar fate.”

Since the verdict, a chorus of political observers and legal analysts have also sharply criticized the legal rationale for the prosecution, as well as the directions the jury was given to reach its conclusion. At Tablet, Park MacDougald wrote:

Now, one might argue that paying your lawyer to arrange an NDA is, in fact, a legal expense, if an unsavory one, but let’s roll with it. The bigger problem is that falsifying business expenses is a misdemeanor in New York, with a two-year statute of limitations. The alleged crime took place in 2017, six years before Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed charges last April. But this misdemeanor can be raised to a felony with a six-year statute of limitations if it was done in furtherance of another crime—which is exactly what Bragg has alleged. 

The exact nature of the other crime, however, was not specified until closing arguments earlier this week. On Tuesday, prosecutors finally revealed that the other crime was … drumroll … a violation of a New York state election law that makes it a misdemeanor to “conspire to promote the election of any person to public office by unlawful means.” So the other crime is also a misdemeanor, which is only a crime if it involves another crime—in this case, whatever crime makes the election conspiracy “unlawful.” So what crime is that? Here, Merchan told the jury they could take their pick between three options: (1) a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA); (2) New York tax fraud; and (3) falsification of other business records—which would mean that Trump falsified business records to conspire to steal the election by falsifying business records. 

Conservative attorney Will Chamberlain explained: 

1. It’s not remotely clear that a. the records were false or b. that Trump knew anything about the attempt to falsify them. It’s not obvious how to classify an NDA expense, and the idea that Trump – who was President at the time of the alleged falsification – was paying attention to how expenses were being recorded in drop-down menus on accounting software strains belief.

2. This is the first time that falsification was charged for records *that were not expected to be seen outside the organization*.  Falsification is normally charged alongside fraud cases where the falsification is in service of, say, getting a bank to issue a loan it wouldn’t otherwise issue. Here there was no fraud. No one was relying on these records. There is no victim. 

Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a liberal attorney who has nonetheless defended Trump from various left-wing claims over the years, was present for the trial’s conclusion and said he has “never seen a spectacle such as the one I observed sitting in the front row of the courthouse yesterday”:

[W]hen the defense’s only substantive witness, the experienced attorney Robert Costello, raised his eyebrows at one of New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s rulings, the court went berserk.

Losing his cool and showing his thin skin, the judge cleared the courtroom of everyone including the media.

For some reason, I was allowed to stay, and I observed one of the most remarkable wrong-headed biases I have ever seen. The judge actually threatened to strike all of Costello’s testimony if he raised his eyebrows again.

That of course would have been unconstitutional because it would have denied the defendant his Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses and to raise a defense.

It would have punished the defendant for something a witness was accused of doing.

Former federal prosecutor and National Review legal analyst Andy McCarthy contended that Merchan’s instructions to the jury were “undermining Trump’s defense but in a way designed to let prosecutors claim on appeal that he gave the defense its due,” relying on the complexities of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) Trump supposedly violated:

Because FECA is a complex, constitutionally fraught corpus of law, Congress mandates that prosecutors prove the defendant acted willfully. That is the most demanding scienter (or intent) requirement in the criminal law, calling for proof that the accused was aware that he had a legal duty and intentionally acted to flout it. As I’ve pointed out, there is no evidence that Trump was even thinking about FECA, much less willfully intending to violate it, in 2016 and 2017, the years when, respectively, the NDAs were negotiated and Cohen was reimbursed […]

So how has Merchan charged the jury? He has blandly instructed them that it is unlawful for a person to “willfully” make or cause the making of contributions that exceed FECA limits. (Jury Instructions at pp. 31, 44.) But he hasn’t instructed them on what “willfully” means.

This is sabotage. Evidently, Bragg’s prosecutors convinced Merchan that it would be too confusing for the jury to instruct them on multiple criminal states of mind — i.e., that an instruction on willfulness would be too mind-bending after the jury had been instructed of the “intent to defraud” element of the business-records offense. (Jury Instructions, p. 28.) But that’s just the point: Trump is entitled to have the jury told that it’s harder to prove willfulness — which, among other things, would focus the jury on the dearth of intent proof against Trump on FECA during the relevant 2016–17 timeframe.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley was similarly critical of the outcome, but focused on what comes next:

Manhattan is neither the entirety of the country nor the legal system. I believe that these convictions will be overturned, but it will take time. Judge Merchan committed, in my view, layers of reversible error. Eventually, this case may reach the United States Supreme Court.

Turley added that while he does not expect Trump to receive jail time, “after [Merchan’s] ruling in this trial, it is impossible to rule anything out. However, any jail sentence would add even more outrage to an abuse of the criminal law system.”

As for how Republicans should respond, Powerline’s John Hindraker calls it “absolutely essential that Trump be elected president” to rebuke Democrats, followed by a renewed push in red states and the federal level to prosecute left-wing abuses of power:

Second, the Democrats understand nothing except the raw exercise of power. Therefore, Republican attorneys general and district attorneys should bring criminal charges against Democratic officeholders wherever possible. No Democratic officeholder should be allowed to retire, in any jurisdiction with Republican law enforcement, without facing criminal charges. There can’t be a single Democratic official in America against whom a criminal case can’t be brought that is better than this case against Trump. It should be open season on Democrats in the criminal courts.

Third, the criminal prosecutions should begin with Joe Biden. Unlike Trump, Biden is actually a criminal. He is already known to be guilty under the federal bribery statute, to the tune of at least $20 million. If Trump wins in November, his Department of Justice should immediately indict Biden, and Biden should be hounded until the day he dies or goes to prison, whichever happens first.

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running against both Trump and Biden, said the “Democratic Party’s strategy is to beat President Trump in the courtroom rather than the ballot box” was “profoundly undemocratic” and rooted in fear they could not beat Trump legitimately, whereas he wants to stick to debating Trump’s policy record.

Polls currently indicate a razor-thin popular vote but a 302-236 victory for Trump in the Electoral College. Some voters have said that convictions in Trump’s various ongoing legal battles would make them less likely to support him, but serious concern among Democrats over Biden’s age and mental health, and deep dissatisfaction with his job performance, give the current president comparable electoral challenges, with many predicting that independent voters will prioritize changing their life circumstances under Biden over whatever they may personally think of Trump.