Donald Trump is now a convicted felon. What happens next?
Businessman. Reality-TV star. President. Convicted felon. The improbable life story of Donald Trump has an ignominious new chapter, courtesy of a New York court verdict.
Trump was found guilty on state charges of falsifying business records, in concealing payments to a porn star during the 2016 election to keep her from talking publicly about their past affair.
In the span of just a few minutes on Thursday, the foreman of a Manhattan jury read out the unanimous verdict to count, after count, after count that will thrust the country into unknown political territory.
“Guilty,” said the middle-aged man, wearing a casual blue sweater. “Guilty. … Guilty. … Guilty,” he said, repeating himself 34 times for each of the counts.
Some in the courtroom gasped as the judge had announced there was a verdict. He’d been planning to send the jury home at the end of the day, when the foreman sent a note heralding a decision.
Donald Trump has been found guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments to two women ahead of the 2016 election, becoming the first former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime.
At 5:03 p.m. local time, the jurors re-entered the room. Not a single one of them appeared to stare at Trump as they walked right past him toward the jury box. By 5:07 p.m., they’d convicted him.
Minutes later, they filed right past him again, none making any visible eye contact as they exited.
Trump sat impassive during the verdict, with the parties having just been warned by the judge not to react as the decision was announced.
Trump later gave his son Eric a prolonged, vigorous handshake as they left the courtroom minutes later, exiting this scene into that new, uncharted territory.
The first man ever to serve as U.S. president and be convicted of a crime has been ordered to come back to receive his sentence on July 11.
This is just days before the Republican convention where Trump is scheduled to be officially crowned the party’s presidential nominee.
Trump to continue campaign
To be clear, Trump remains free to keep running for president; it’s a race he might very well win, if current public opinion polls are accurate.
“The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people [on election day],” Trump said in a defiant statement. “I’m a very innocent man, and it’s OK, I’m fighting for our country.”
But the verdict will unleash an unpredictable succession of events that could wind on without resolution for months — potentially even for years.
First, Trump will be asked to meet with a probation officer in the coming days. That officer will be asked to write a sentencing report, including details such as whether Trump shows contrition.
A veteran New York City criminal lawyer has this unsolicited advice for Trump: admit your guilt in that meeting, or say nothing.
“Just don’t deny it,” said Mark Cohen, who has spent decades first as a prosecutor, then a defence lawyer. “Denying it would be a problem with the judge.”
That judge is Juan Merchan, a daily target of Trump’s wrath.
Trump will certainly appeal the verdict, alleging bias and judicial errors, arguing that Merchan sealed Trump’s fate by issuing unfair instructions to the jury that were impossible to defend against. Those appeals could take years to sort out.
In the meantime, Merchan will decide Trump’s short-term fate.
Merchan’s July 11 sentencing decision will hang like an un-detonated bomb over the coming weeks of the presidential election.
Penalties range from fines to prison time
That’s because the gamut of potential penalties for this crime is head-spinningly vast: Trump could receive anything from a verbal warning, to probation conditions, to serious prison time — potentially up to four years for each of the 34 counts.
The prevailing view is that Trump won’t go to prison. As a first-time offender, convicted for the lowest category of non-violent felony, most legal observers expect a lesser penalty.
“Almost no one familiar with the New York criminal legal system expects a sentence of incarceration,” said Tim Bakken, a former New York prosecutor who now teaches law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York state.
There’s a caveat here. Trump’s behaviour throughout the trial — with his frequent trashing of the judge and witnesses, and his string of contempt-of-court findings — makes a harsher penalty possible.
“Before this [trial] started, I would have thought [he’d get] probation,” Cohen told CBC News.
“[But] Trump’s done his best to promote disrespect for the law. So I would think that would be something that Merchan’s gotta be thinking about.”
So there is the possibility that a presidential candidate might be campaigning from jail.
And there’s no telling how Trump supporters might react.
Outside the courthouse this week, Joe Palau, a construction worker from Brooklyn in a red MAGA cap, insisted a conviction would backfire politically. “If he’s found guilty, more people will go to him.”
Cynthia Frybarger, a Trump critic from California who was in town taking in the scene, described it as a well-deserved serving of justice to a man she described as a decades-long law-breaker.
Trump first made news headlines in the 1970s when the U.S. Justice Department sued his family business for refusing to rent apartments to Black and Latino people in violation of anti-housing-discrimination laws; the suit was settled out of court.
“I’m embarrassed by it, to be honest with you,” said Frybarger, 73, a retiree who worked in the lending industry. She was standing outside the courtroom this week holding a sign that said, “Lock Him Up.”
“Doesn’t make me a proud American.”
Ultimately, Trump’s fate may play out in a far larger court of public opinion, as more than 100 million Americans are expected to cast ballots in this year’s presidential election.
The impact of this verdict will be scrutinized ferociously. Polls will be pored over in the coming days to determine whether this monumental event tilts the race toward President Joe Biden.
Watching the next polls
Here’s all we know on that score.
In the lead-up to the trial in April, several surveys suggested a guilty verdict could damage Trump politically. They said he might lose several crucial percentage points, trigger a stampede of swing voters or lead a staggering 16 to 24 per cent of his voters to reconsider their support.
We’re no longer in the world of hypothetical statistics. We’re now entering a real-world scenario where there’s no proof this shift will happen.
It is an untested proposition, to put it mildly, that the criminal cover-up of a two-decade-old affair will succeed in reducing Trump’s support where so many other events have not.
Two presidential impeachments, the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a sexual-abuse finding, recorded remarks about forcing himself upon women, a corporate-fraud verdict and promises to use state tools to punish his adversaries — none of these have made Trump electorally toxic.
In the meantime, the native New Yorker produced a memorable New York moment. Scores of people filled the street near the courthouse after the verdict, snapping photos outside a police barrier.
Some were Trump fans, some were detractors, some just curious onlookers. Noah Bergin, a musician in town from Indiana to play a concert, said he never believed Trump would be convicted on all 34 counts.
He described feeling relieved that nobody is above the law. As for predicting the effect it will have on the 2024 presidential race, he reacted with a touch of humility that even a seasoned pundit might emulate here.
“It’s a long way ’til the election,” Bergin said.
“We’ll see how it plays out.”
Former U.S. president Donald Trump has been found guilty in his New York hush-money trial. CBC’s Anya Zoledziowski breaks down the key evidence and witnesses that led the jury to the historic conviction.
Published at Mon, 15 Apr 2024 09:35:06 +0000
Israeli military recovers bodies of 7 hostages, pulls out of Jabalia area of Gaza
Israeli forces have ended combat operations in the Jabalia area of north Gaza after destroying more than 10 kilometres of tunnels during days of intense fighting that included over 200 airstrikes, the military said on Friday.
At the south end of Gaza, Israeli forces pressing an offensive into Rafah found rocket launchers and other weapons as well as tunnel shafts built by Hamas in the city centre, the army said. Tank-led Israeli troops aim to break up Hamas’s fighting formations in the city on the border with Egypt.
In an update on more than two weeks of intense fighting in Jabalia, the Israeli military said troops had completed their operation and withdrawn to prepare for other operations in Gaza.
During the operation, troops recovered the bodies of seven of the hostages, the military said, without elaborating on their identities. Hamas-led militants abducted abducted some 250 people when they stormed over the border into Israel on Oct. 7 last year and killed around 1,200 people, according to Israeli government tallies. About 120 people remain unaccounted for.
Over 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and land war since Oct. 7 in Gaza, its Hamas-run health ministry says, and much of the densely populated enclave lies in ruins.
Jabalia has seen heavy fighting
In Jabalia, a densely packed urban district populated by refugees from the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and their descendants, Hamas turned the “civilian area into a fortified combat compound,” the military statement said.
It said Israeli troops killed hundreds of militants in close-quarter combat and seized large caches of weaponry and destroyed rocket launchers primed for use.
LISTEN | Kenneth Roth, human rights expert, on Israel’s investigations:
Front Burner26:49When Israel investigates itself, what happens?
Underground, Israeli forces disabled a weapons-filled tunnel network extending over 10 kilometres and killed Hamas’s district battalion commander, it said.
Israel has blamed what it calls Hamas’s deliberate embedding of fighters in residential areas for the high civilian toll in the war. Hamas has denied using civilians as cover for fighters.
Jabalia has been battered by intense combat for weeks, underscoring Israel’s difficulty in destroying Hamas units.
There were weeks of heavy fighting in Jabalia in the early stages of the Israeli campaign, and in January the military said it had killed all the Hamas commanders and eliminated the combat formations of Gaza’s ruling group in the area.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to eradicate Hamas as a fighting and political force has run up against the Islamist group’s deep roots in Gaza’s social fabric.
12 killed in central Gaza
Israeli tanks rumbled into the centre of Rafah on Tuesday as part of a series of probing operations around the area that has become one of the main focal points of the war in Gaza, now in its eighth month.
The army said it had come across longer-range rockets as well as stocks of rocket-propelled grenades, explosives and ammunition as it continued “intelligence-based operational activities” in Rafah, which skirts Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Hamas fighters demonstrated their continuing strength in Rafah last week, launching missiles at Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv for the first time in months on Sunday.
At least a dozen people were killed, including children, in two airstrikes Friday in central Gaza, according to hospital officials and The Associated Press journalists who counted the bodies. The strikes hit Nuseirat and Bureij, and two children and four women were among those killed and the bodies were brought to the Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
Islamic Jihad, Hamas’s smaller militant ally, said on Friday it fired a barrage of mortar bombs at a gathering of Israeli soldiers and vehicles penetrating the vicinity of Salah al-Din Gate on Rafah’s southern fringes. It gave no more details.
Rafah, the only major city in Gaza yet to have been taken by Israeli forces, had been a refuge for more than one million Palestinians driven from their homes by fighting in other areas of the small coastal enclave, but most have now left after being told to evacuate ahead of the Israeli operation.
Hundreds of thousands are now living in tents and other temporary shelters in a special evacuation zone in nearby Al-Mawasi, a sandy, palm tree-dotted district on the coast, as well as areas in central Gaza.
WATCH l Military campaign in Rafah leads to life-threatening decisions:
Dr. Hatem Dhair, who oversees a neonatal unit in Khan Younis, says his hospital is now treating babies who were transferred there from Rafah — a challenging journey in the deteriorating conditions of southern Gaza.
Israel has signalled for weeks that it intended to mount an assault on the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah, drawing international condemnation and warnings even from allies like the United States not to attack the city while it remained full of displaced people.
The risks were underlined on Sunday when an Israeli airstrike targeting two Hamas commanders outside the city set off a blaze that killed at least 45 people sheltering in tents next to the compound hit by the jets.
As the war has dragged on and Gaza’s infrastructure has been widely demolished, malnutrition has spread among the 2.3 million population as aid deliveries have slowed to a trickle, and the United Nations has warned of incipient famine.
Published at Fri, 31 May 2024 13:23:06 +0000
