House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday called on the Supreme Court of the United States to take action after a jury convicted former President Donald Trump on Thursday.
The Manhattan jury convicted the former president in the case brought by Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Johnson on “Fox & Friends” said it is clear the Supreme Court should intervene as the conviction threatens the American justice system.
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“I do believe the Supreme Court should step in, obviously,” Johnson said. “This is totally unprecedented, and it’s dangerous to our system. We’ve all discussed this before and y’all talk about it all the time. This is diminishing the American people’s faith in our system of justice itself. And to maintain a republic, you have to have that. People have to believe that justice is fair, that there is equal justice under law.”
“They don’t see that right now,” he continued. “And I think that the justices on the court, I know many of them personally, I think they are deeply concerned about that as we are. So, I think they’ll set this straight, but it’s going to take a while … The process takes a while to play out. The Democrats know that, of course. And they are dragging it out. That was the whole objective. They want to try to bankrupt Donald Trump. They want to diminish his credibility. And go after his character. They wanted to keep him off the campaign trail, which they were successful in doing for many weeks. And now they want to call him the convicted felon. This will be overturned, guys. There is no question about it. It’s going to take some time to do it.”
Trump attorney Will Scharf said on Thursday before the conviction of the former president that his team would “speedily appeal” if the jury found him guilty.
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig and criminal defense attorney Michael O’Mara on Friday said Trump’s appeal will likely be on the grounds that the case was unprecedented and that Judge Juan Merchan did not sequester the jury.
“I think there’s a great likelihood, and the reason why is there are a number of issues,” O’Mara said in response to a question about the likelihood of the appeal succeeding. “I have always complained about the way this jury was or was not handled during the trial. I think with the massive focus on this case that they should have been sequestered. They certainly should have been sequestered during the deliberations. I think they should have been sequestered for the week before.”
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