Trump verdict live updates: Donald Trump found guilty on all 34 counts in hush money trial

Members of the public, some whom support Donald Trump and some who do not, shared their reactions to the historic trial with The Independent outside court.

DVS 7.0 (real name Shaun) is a Christian rapper and Trump supporter

“What a tragedy. But at the same time, excited for what’s coming after this because we’re going to see a brand new red wave. They just strengthen the, they just strengthen the base. They just told people like me and everyone here that we’re all the same. He’s just like one of us.

Ben Guthrie, a 75-year-old retiree. Holding a sign saying GUILTY

“I have a lot of admiration for the courage of the jurors. It was not an easy thing. He’s as threatening as he is to everybody who stands up to him and all those jurors were incredibly courageous. And I was also impressed with how careful they were arriving at the verdict.”

Prior to Donald Trump’s conviction on Thursday, his supporters clashed outside the court with a surprise celebrity guest – Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro.

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.