Trump lashes out at ‘crooked’ judge, trial after historic conviction
Donald Trump launched into attacks on the judge in his criminal trial and continued to disparage New York’s criminal justice system Friday as he tried to repackage his conviction on 34 felony charges as fuel for his latest White House bid.
Trump spoke to reporters at his namesake tower in Manhattan on Friday, his return to campaigning a day after he was convicted of trying to illegally influence the 2016 election by falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed they had sex.
He was the first former U.S. president to be criminally indicted, let alone convicted.
“If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said. “These are very bad people.”
He made reference to the judge in his case, Juan M. Merchan, who imposed a gag order on Trump after the defendant repeatedly levied public criticism against witnesses and many others affiliated with his case.
Anthony Capozzolo, former federal prosecutor and former assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, discusses Donald Trump’s multiple guilty verdicts and whether the former president’s criminal conviction could lead to jail time.
Trump called the judge “highly conflicted” and “crooked” and made reference to other aspects of the case, including to unnamed witnesses and court experts, which could be addressed at his upcoming sentencing.
“I say that knowing that it’s very dangerous for me to say that, and I don’t mind, because I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to save our country and to save our constitution,” Trump said, to a round of applause from those gathered in the lobby of Manhattan’s Trump Tower.
He took no reporter questions after the 40-minute speech.
In the past months, Trump has promised retribution, if re-elected, against assorted perceived rivals and persecutors.
Elsewhere, Trump made several campaign-style statements about crime, irregular migration and President Joe Biden’s green energy policies.
Biden’s campaign team issued a statement characterizing Trump as “consumed his own thirst for revenge and retribution.”
“America just witnessed a confused, desperate and defeated Donald Trump ramble about his own personal grievances and lie about the American justice system, leaving anyone watching with one obvious conclusion: This man cannot be president of the United States,” the statement read.
Appellate process could take months
The hush money case, though criticized by some legal experts who called it the weakest of the four prosecutions against Trump, takes on added importance not only because it proceeded to trial first, but also because it could be the only one of Trump’s cases to reach a jury before the election.
The other three — local and federal cases in Georgia and Washington, D.C., that allege criminality in his efforts to deny his 2020 election loss, as well as a federal indictment in Florida charging him with illegally hoarding top-secret records after his presidency — are bogged down by delays or outstanding legal issues that have yet to be resolved.
CBC chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault talks to David Frum about why he thinks Donald Trump’s conviction should have been linked to his role in the Capitol riots instead of hush-money and what it means for democracy in the U.S.
Trump’s campaign said Friday it has raised $34.8 million US in small-dollar online contributions since his conviction.
He is scheduled to be sentenced in the New York case on July 11.
The charge of falsifying business records is a Class E felony in New York, the lowest tier of felony charges in the state. It is punishable by up to four years in prison, though the punishment would ultimately be up to the judge. Other punishments could include a fine or probation.
It’s unclear to what extent the judge may factor in the political and logistical complexities of jailing a former president who is running to reclaim the White House. As well, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg declined to say on Thursday whether prosecutors ask the judge to seek prison time.
After Trump is sentenced, he can challenge his conviction in a New York appellate court and possibly the state’s highest court, a timeline that could extend beyond the Nov. 5 election.
Trump called the date the “most important day in the history of our country,” and he confirmed Friday he plans to appeal.
While a president has broad pardon power, should Trump be elected to a new term at the White House, that does not extend to convictions meted out at the state level, as in the hush money case.
Alex Panetta, a Washington correspondent for CBC News, was in the New York courtroom on Thursday when the jury read out the verdict convicting former U.S. president Donald Trump of 34 charges. Here’s what he saw.
Republicans line up behind Trump
Several Republican lawmakers have reacted with fury to Trump’s conviction.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said it was a “shameful day in American history” and labelled the charges as “purely political.” Other members of the party in Congress have used more incendiary language, with analogies to “show trials” and a “banana republic” verdict more commonly seen in authoritarian countries.
Trump’s incendiary language after the 2020 election has been seized upon by some Capitol riot defendants who faced trial. In more recent times, judges and prosecutors working on his civil and criminal cases have faced threats and doxing attempts.
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.
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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.
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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
