“We should all be thankful for the careful attention that this jury paid to the evidence and the law, and their time and commitment over these past several weeks,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said during a news conference on Thursday after former president Donald Trump was convicted on “34 counts of falsifying business records in the first-degree to conceal a scheme to corrupt the 2016 election.”
It took less than 10 hours of deliberation for jurors to reach that decision, which made Donald Trump the first ex-president to be a convicted felon. The case laid out by prosecutors was straightforward, tracing Trump’s actions to conceal payments made to keep a former adult movie star he had sex with from telling her story to the press. Trump started the scheme as his 2016 presidential campaign was floundering and fellow Republicans denounced him after a 2005 recording of Trump bragging about sexually molesting women (“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it.”) became public.
“Twelve everyday New Yorkers — and of course, our alternates — heard testimony from 22 witnesses, including former and current employees of the defendant, media executives, book publishers, custodians of records and others,” Bragg said. “They reviewed call logs, text messages and emails. They heard recordings, they saw checks and invoices, bank statements and calendar appointments.”
Bragg’s remarks were brief, his demeanor was sober and professional. He declined to speak about Trump’s upcoming sentencing hearing or speculate on the wider impact of the case when asked to do so by reporters.
Even before Bragg spoke less than 90 minutes after the verdict, Iowa’s leading Republican elected officials were denouncing him and the verdict.
“America saw this trial for what it was, a sham,” Gov. Kim Reynolds said in an official statement issued by her office. “For years, Democrats like Alvin Bragg have been trying to put President Trump in jail with complete disregard for our democracy and the will of the American people. The only verdict that matters is the one at the ballot box in November where the American people will elect President Trump again.”
The prepared statement landed in Little Village’s email inbox nine minutes after the last of the 34 guilty verdicts was delivered by the jury. The same statement was posted on the governor’s personal political Twitter/X page when it went out as an email (the @KimReynolds account, not the semi-anonymous account Reynolds used to disparage Trump and promote Gov. Ron DeSantis during the Iowa Caucus.)
Those three sentences were the entirety of the governor’s statement. Despite denouncing Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the New York court system repeatedly since Trump was first indicted by a grand jury in March 2023, Reynolds has never engaged with the exact charges the former president faced or the evidence presented proving them.
The other Iowa Republican leaders — like other Republican leaders around the country — did the same as the governor and ignored the evidence in the case, and focused on undermining confidence in the justice system and the verdict. Except for Sen. Joni Ernst, all the other Republicans used their personal and political campaigning social media accounts for their comments.
On her official senatorial account, Ernst attacked “the Democrats” in general, claiming they had corrupted the justice system.
Iowa’s top legal official, Attorney General Brenna Bird, was a bit more restrained than she was when she attended Trump’s trial on May 13, and then participated in a photo op outside the courtroom, denouncing the prosecution as “a scam and a sham.” She did begin on a very dramatic note.
Ashley Hinson followed up her tweet denouncing the trial with a tweet linking to a Trump fundraising site that calls the former president “a political prisoner.”
Relying on the same talking points that national Republicans are using, and refusing to confront the evidence or address Trump’s long history of defrauding customers and contractors, lying to the public and media, or his recent court cases where he was found civilly liable for sexual assault and long-term business fraud, inevitably results in some very similar statements. The tweets from Rep. Miller-Meeks and Sen. Grassley demonstrate as much, though Miller-Meeks speculated about a Trump win in the election and Grassley speculated about an unlikely Trump win on appeal.
Rep. Randy Feenstra, whose district covers western Iowa, tweeted the briefest statement.
“While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial and ultimately today at this verdict, in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors,” DA Alvin Bragg said during his four-minute-long prepared remarks.
“This type of white-collar prosecution is core to what we do at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office,” he explained.
Bragg cited the example of his predecessor in the 1930s, Thomas Dewey, who Bragg said “ushered in the era of the modern independent professional prosecutor” with his cases against corrupt public officials and business leaders. Bragg said the case against Trump was “built upon that fine tradition.”
Bragg didn’t mention that Dewey was a Republican, and his success in prosecuting corrupt officials made him one of the most popular Republicans in the country. After his time as Manhattan District Attorney, Dewey was elected governor of New York. He went on to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948.
The current Republican presidential nominee held a photo op at Trump Tower on Friday morning to denounce his conviction on the 34 counts. He did not take questions from reporters.
During his rambling and disjointed speech, Trump kept referring to the bad things done and being done by an ill-defined “they.” Sometimes the “they” referred to prosecutors, the judge in his case and other judges, as well as other people in the justice system. Sometimes it didn’t (“They want to stop you from having cars with their ridiculous mandates that make it impossible for you to get a car.”)
The bulk of Trump’s speech was a repetition of lies and complaints he has been making since the criminal case began, along with rehashings of older grievances (including his two impeachments as president, FBI Director James Comey and the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack) and his standard hyperbolic false statements (repeatedly describing the process as “rigged” and “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”)
At the beginning and the end, Trump stoked fear of immigrants, as he often does at campaign appearances. Shortly before his final burst of xenophobic rhetoric, the former president said, “We’re dealing with a corrupt government. We have a corrupt country. Our elections are corrupt.”
There was no hint of irony in that last sentence, even though the 34 counts Trump was convicted on were increased from misdemeanors to felonies because the jurors decided he falsified his business records in an effort to corruptly influence an election.