Trump reacted to the verdict fitfully, calling the trial “a disgrace, this was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge that was corrupt”.
“The real verdict is going to be November 5 by the people, and they know what happened here,” he said outside the courtroom.
“We didn’t do a thing wrong, I’m a very innocent man,” he went on. “This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt a political opponent.”
The case involved the allegation that Trump paid US$130,000 in hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 election to buy her silence about a tryst they had.
That in itself may not have broken any laws, but the case centred on a controversial legal premise: that the payment was a form of campaign contribution – a misdemeanour – and the falsifying of 34 business records concealed a second crime, a conspiracy to help his 2016 campaign by unlawful means, which elevated each count to a felony.
Trump denied having an affair with Daniels and pleaded not guilty. But after publicly vowing to testify, he did not take the stand.
The jury, which began deliberating on Wednesday morning, reached a relatively quick decision after considering the evidence for some nine hours in the extraordinary case.
The trial’s conclusion will presumably allow Trump to resume a full schedule of campaigning, which was largely limited to Wednesdays and weekends during the course of the six-week trial.
Trump and US President Joe Biden are in an extremely tight race for the nation’s top office but analysts question whether Trump’s time in court – away from the campaign trail, seated at a table for hours of testimony often looking sullen, angry and even sleepy – has hurt him among his loyal base.
Since the indictment was brought in April 2023, Trump has framed the case as a vindictive political “witch hunt” filed in a Democrat-dominated state, overseen by a “corrupt” judge and fanned by “fake news” media.
This is part of a long-standing Trump playbook to discredit opponents and dull in advance the impact of any expected bad news. He contends that the three other criminal cases against him – two federal, one in the state of Georgia – are witch hunts as well.
But this case, and the others, have taken a financial toll as Trump has been forced to devote significant amounts of money that could be spent on his campaign.
Federal Election Commission data and an analysis by the Associated Press estimated that Trump’s fundraising arms, including Save America, his presidential campaign, applied at least US$76.7 million to legal fees over the two years.
Under a March joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee, donations to the party are now routed to his campaign and to pay his legal bills before the committee gets its cut, according to the Associated Press.
While the case – filed by new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – was the first case ever to indict a former US president for allegedly criminal behaviour, in many ways it was considered the most benign of the cases arrayed against Trump.
Yet all three other cases, involving another 54 felony counts and grounded in more conventional criminal law, have been delayed pending various Trump appeals.
The first federal case by Special Counsel Jack Smith concerns boxes of classified national-security documents Trump took with him when he left the White House in 2021 and resisted government efforts to retrieve them, with sensitive papers found in a bedroom, shower and ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate in south Florida.
The second case Smith has brought contends that Trump strove to overturn the 2020 election – which he lost by 7 million votes to Biden – and incited the violence and chaos at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a bid to delay the election’s certification.
The Georgia case also alleges Trump’s election interference in the state and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The New York and Georgia cases are particularly consequential for Trump. Should he be re-elected, he could presumably have the Department of Justice shut down the federal cases against him. But he could not do that with state cases, nor could he commute or pardon any convictions issued from a state court.
Much of the New York trial centred on the testimony of Trump’s one-time lawyer and “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who made the payment to Daniels and was then repaid by Trump. The defence argued that Cohen was a convicted liar who could not be trusted while the prosecution contended that even without Cohen’s testimony, an extensive paper trail underscored Trump’s involvement and guilt.