In his first remarks since a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, President Joe Biden took a thinly veiled swipe at the former president’s attacks on the justice system.
“It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict,” Biden said, speaking to reporters at the White House.
The president’s comments came hours after Trump blamed him for his legal woes in remarks to the press and supporters, saying: “This is all done by Biden and his people. This is done by Washington. No one has ever seen anything like this.”
Slamming both prosecutors and the judge overseeing the case, Trump said: “This is a scam, this is a rigged trial. It shouldn’t have been in that venue. We shouldn’t have had that judge.”
In his remarks on the verdict Friday, Biden said, “The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” and commended the 12 jurors in the cases for carefully deliberating and reaching a unanimous verdict.
“Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself,” Biden said, adding that the case was “heard by a jury of 12 citizens, 12 Americans, 12 people like you.”
Trump has repeatedly railed against the New York criminal case, the judge overseeing it, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the charges against him, as well as some of the witnesses who ended up testifying at the trial.
The verbal attacks led Judge Juan Merchan in March to impose a partial gag order on Trump, barring him from speaking publicly about potential jurors, individual prosecutors and “known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses concerning their potential participation.”
Trump repeatedly blasted Merchan for imposing the order, claiming the judge had, “taken away my constitutional right.”
Merchan later ruled that Trump violated the gag order multiple times, fining him a total of $10,000 and threatening to throw him in jail.
Biden and Trump have not met face-to-face so far this election cycle, but the two will share a stage for the first general election debate in late June in Atlanta.
It’s possible the two candidates will be asked about the former president’s legal woes during their debate. Trump has often blamed Biden for his legal troubles, falsely accusing the sitting president of “weaponizing” the Justice Department.
Trump still faces charges in three other cases — one in Georgia, where he’s accused alongside over a dozen others of working to overturn the 2020 election results there, and two federal cases related to his efforts to overturn the presidential election results and related to his storage of classified documents.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
