Live updates: Donald Trump found guilty on all counts in historic hush money trial

Shortly after the jury returned the verdict on Thursday, Donald Trump gave a brief statement, railing against the judge and the Manhattan district attorney and claiming the entire trial was “rigged” against him by the Biden administration.

“I am a very innocent man,” Trump said in the hallway of the courthouse.

Trump repeated many of the same accusations and excuses he has voiced throughout the six-week-long trial – that he is innocent, the trial is rigged, the judge was “conflicted” and more.

“We have a country that’s in big trouble, but this was a rigged decision right from day one, with a conflicted judge who should have never been allowed to try this case,” Trump said.

The convicted former president claimed the “real verdict” would come November when the country votes for the next president.

“And we’ll keep fighting we’ll fight till the end and we’ll win because our country has gone to hell. We don’t have the same country anymore. We have a divided mess. We’re a nation in decline, serious decline, millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now, from prisons and from mental institutions terrorists, and they’re taking over our country,” Trump said.

Read the full statement by Robert F Kennedy Jr, following the guilty verdict in the Trump trial: The Democratic Party’s strategy is to beat President Trump in the courtroom rather than the ballot box. This will backfire in November.

Even worse, it is profoundly undemocratic. America deserves a President who can win at the ballot box without compromising our government’s separation of powers or weaponizing the courts.

You can’t save democracy by destroying it first. The Democrats are afraid they will lose in the voting booth, so instead they go after President Trump in the courtroom. I’m also running against President Trump in this election.

The difference is I’m challenging him on his record. His lockdowns during Covid. His atrocious environmental record. His cozy relationship with corporate America. His support for the war machine. His failure to root out waste and corruption in Washington.

His service to the billionaire class. His bloating of the national debt. These are the issues that shape American lives. I’ll challenge him on these things, but the Democrats won’t. You know why? Because they pursue the very same policies.

At a press conference following the historic verdict, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg who brought the charges against Donald Trump, praised the 12 New Yorkers who had served on the jury.

“The 12 everyday jurors vowed to make a decision based on the evidence and the law and the evidence and the law alone. Their deliberations led them to a unanimous conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt: that the defendant, Donald J Trump is guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree to conceal a scheme to corrupt the 2016 election.”

He added: “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 to the courtroom doors.

“By following the facts and the law. And doing so without fear or favor.”

Donald Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche has denounced the trial as unfair and said they will “vigorously fight” against it with motions that are due in a few weeks, according to CNN.

“There was so much publicity around the witnesses and around – leading up to the trial that our system of justice isn’t supposed to be a system where every person who walks into the courtroom knows about the case,” he told the outlet.

He said that if their fight is not successful, the legal team will appeal following the sentencing in July.

“Every single person on the jury knew Donald Trump as president, as candidate, from ‘The Apprentice’ so I don’t accept that this was a fair place to try President Trump,” Mr Blanche said.

“The law says a person is entitled to a fair trial in front of a jury of their peers and we just think that because of everything around the lead up this trial, it made it very difficult for the jury to evaluate the evidence kind of independent of what they knew coming in,” Mr Blanche said.

Stormy Daniels was “very emotional” after Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts at his criminal hush money trial in New York, both her lawyer and her husband told CNN on Thursday.

Ms Daniels played a central role in the case – the hush money payments that Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid to her were a key part of the evidence in convicting the former president.

Read more here:

The wife of Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and their son, Barron Trump, are in New York, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

It was not immediately clear when they arrived but the two were in the city when Trump was handed a guilty verdict by the court on Thursday.

The former first lady, however, was not present at the fundraiser dinner event with Trump at a private residence last night in New York City.

Donald Trump’s campaign are already using his guilty verdict in New York to push for fundraising for his presidential campaign.

Barely 15 mins after the guilty verdict was returned, an email from the Trump campaign appeared in subscriber inboxes.

“I was just convicted in a RIGGED political witchhunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG,” the email read.

“They’ve raided my home, arrested me, took my mugshot AND NOW THEY’VE JUST CONVICTED ME! But with your support at this moment in history, WE WILL WIN BACK THE WHITE HOUSE AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

The former first daughter, who also served as a special advisor during Trump’s time in office, posted a heartfelt message to her Instagram shortly after her father was convicted in New York on Thursday.

Read more here:

The Biden-Harris campaign released a statement following Donald Trump’s historic guilty verdict, saying that the convicted former president must now be defeated “at the ballot box”.

The statement from comms director Michael Tyler read: “In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law.

“Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain. But today’s verdict does not change the fact that the American people face a simple reality.

“There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box.

“Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president. The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater. He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on day one’ and calling for our Constitution to be ‘terminated’ so he can regain and keep power.

“A second Trump term means chaos, ripping away Americans’ freedoms and fomenting political violence – and the American people will reject it this November.”