Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who declined to comment on the presidential race or his longstanding feud with former President Trump, came to Trump’s defense Thursday night.
Hours after the jury returned a guilty verdict, McConnell announced that the Manhattan District Attorney. Alvin Brango should not have brought the case and predicted the conviction would be overturned.
“These charges should never have been made in the first place. I expect the convictions to be overturned on appeal,” McConnell wrote in a social media post on X.
McConnell’s surprise decision to weigh in on the outcome of a court case he has refused to talk about for months may suggest that Trump’s conviction could have a unifying effect on the GOP — even rallying the party’s biggest skeptics to his defense.
McConnell is letting Trump play the wind with his silence on another big event.
Senate GOP leaders remained silent last April when Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts brought by Bragg.
The main difference between then and now is that a year ago, Republicans who weren’t Trump fans had hopes that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or another Republican would win the presidential nomination.
However, Trump is ousting his opponents this year and is the GOP nominee.
He is having trouble unifying the party, however, because a significant share of GOP primary voters in Indiana and other states have voted for former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, even though she dropped out of the presidential race in March.
Thursday’s ruling may bring skeptical mainstream Republicans closer to Trump.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the leading Senate GOP moderate, who voted to impeach Trump on impeachment charges that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, criticized Bragg Thursday for pursuing a politically motivated prosecution.
“It is fundamental to our American justice system that the government prosecutes cases because of the alleged criminal acts regardless of who is the defendant. In this case the opposite has happened. The district attorney, who campaigned on the promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought the charges because of who was accused rather than because of a determined criminal act,” Collins said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
“The political basis of this case is more blurred between the judicial system and the electoral system, and this verdict will be the subject of a long appeal process,” he said.
McConnell and Collins were the two biggest Trump skeptics at the Senate GOP conference to slam Bragg’s decision to prosecute the former president, but other Republican senators not close to Trump also rallied in defense.
“I’ve been on the plane, but I just landed and saw the news. This case has been politically motivated from the beginning, and the verdict today does nothing to free the partisan nature of this prosecution,” said the Senate Republican Whip John Thune (SD), who opposed Trump’s attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2021 and Trump’s career then tried to end it in retaliation.
Trump tried to mount a conservative primary challenge to knock Thune out of office in 2022, but that effort failed.
Past bad blood appeared to be forgotten by Thune on Thursday after the verdict was announced.
“Regardless of the outcome, more and more Americans know that we cannot live with four more years of Joe Biden. With President Trump in the White House and a Republican majority in the US Senate, we can finally put an end to the Biden-Schumer agenda that is destroying American families and businesses ,” Thune said in reaction to the verdict.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (DNY) offered his own response shortly after McConnell criticized Trump’s impeachment success.
“No one is above the law. The verdict is its own,” Schumer said in a brief statement.
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