Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) characteristically rushed to former President Donald Trump’s defense this week after a Manhattan jury found the ex-president guilty of dozens of felony criminal offenses on Thursday. The case accused Trump of the felony falsification of business records in connection to hush money from before the 2016 election for a woman named Stormy Daniels.
“Democrats don’t have the courage to call out the corruption in our justice system after Trump’s guilty verdict. They don’t care about the rule of law or the Constitution,” asserted a post on Cruz’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) following the developments.
There is, to be clear, no clear-cut evidence of the proceedings against Trump hinging on political bias as opposed to specifically alleged actions on Trump’s part: allegations a jury accepted.
“Ted, a jury of 12 non-partisan, everyday Americans unanimously found that the admissible evidence proved that defendant Trump interfered in the 2016 election beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the definition of the rule of law. You just don’t like the outcome,” replied Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) on the same platform. Goldman, in his capacity as a lawyer, helped with the first impeachment case against then-President Trump, later joining Congress as a member and now serving on the House Judiciary Committee.
Prosecutors’ original case did incorporate an accusation of an ambition to influence the 2016 election, though jurors didn’t have to agree on that point for conviction.
The outrage from Trump’s political corner was consistent and wide-ranging, and it also targeted jurors — no matter previous concerns already lingering out there of those individuals potentially facing threats and violence. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for instance, directly went after the “jury pool,” complaining about a “jury pool that comes from one of the most liberal areas of America,” meaning New York City, though the high-profile jurisdiction is as much a part of the United States as the most sparsely populated rural area. Americans live there, too!
Appeals are now on deck in Trump’s criminal case, which was his first to reach trial out of four cases.
