JUST IN: Audio Of Trump’s Fiery Mid-Sentencing Courtroom Takedown Is Released
Before he was sentenced on Friday, President-elect Donald Trump held court in dramatic fashion. He listed a litany of grievances he called a “tremendous setback” for New York’s court system as his attorneys and Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan listened quietly.
Audio of the exchange was released shortly after Trump was sentenced to “unconditional discharge” for his conviction on 34 felony counts of hiding a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. The sentence amounts to less than a slap on the wrist, saddling Trump with the designation of being a convicted felon but offering no tangible consequence for his crime. To be sure, the president-elect has vowed to pursue an exhaustive appeal of the verdict by a New York jury, which he has long claimed was biased and unfair for a Republican like him seeking a fair trial in an election year. In his remarks, Trump oscillated between blaming everyone from President Joe Biden and the Justice Department to District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat.
“This is a case that, from what I read and what I hear, that was inappropriately handled before [Bragg] got there,” Trump said, referencing an individual from the DOJ who left the Biden administration to join the district attorney’s office several months before Trump was first charged. “That gentleman, from what I heard, was criminal or almost criminal in what he did. It was very inappropriate. It was somebody involved with my political opponent” Biden, who at the time was still seeking reelection. Trump also rebuffed Bragg’s charge that he directed that the payment to Daniels, meant to quiet rumors of an affair, be listed as a business expense to the Trump Organization rather than a campaign expense. “Part of the records that we’re talking about, they’re saying I… falsified business records. Well, the falsification of business records, as they said, was wholly a legal expense where everyone could see them. In other words, that legal fee or legal expense was put down by accountants. They weren’t put down by me, they were put down by accountants,” Trump said in court Friday. “For this, I got indicted.”
Over more than six minutes, the Republican leader voices his anger at facing the very real possibility of jail time had he not won the election. Legal observers who are “not exactly friends of mine” agreed that “the case should have never been brought,” Trump told an unsympathetic Judge Merchan before his sentencing. “It’s an injustice of justice,” he said, listing off attorneys like Jonathan Turley, Andy McCarthy, and “Elie Honig at CNN of all places.” “It’s been a political witch hunt, it was done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election, and obviously that didn’t work. And the people of our country got to see this firsthand because they got to see this in your courtroom and then they voted and then I won by the largest number of votes by far of any Republican candidate in history and won, as you know, all seven swing states… and won the popular vote by millions and millions of votes, and they’ve been watching your trial, and they understood it.”
He finished on a defiant note. “The people of this country understand what’s going on. They understand this is a weaponization of government. They call it lawfare. Never happened to any extent like this, but never happened in our country before, and I’d just like to explain that I was treated very, very unfairly.”
WATCH:
