‘I think they’ll set this straight, but it’s going to take a while,’ Mr. Johnson said of his expectations for the verdict to be overturned.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that the U.S. Supreme Court should get involved and overturn former President Donald Trump’s guilty verdict in his business records falsification trial in New York, with the speaker arguing that the circumstances of the case have led to an erosion of public faith in America’s justice system.
“There’s a lot of developments yet to come, but I do believe the Supreme Court should step in, obviously, this is totally unprecedented—and it’s dangerous to our system,” Mr. Johnson said in a May 31 appearance on Fox and Friends.
A jury found the former president guilty on May 30 in a case in which he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal non-disclosure payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels as part of a bid to influence the 2016 presidential election in which he was a candidate.
The guilty verdict made President Trump the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted of a crime, with the former president vowing to appeal the verdict and calling the trial “very unfair.”
“This is a scam. This is a rigged trial … this is a rigged judge,” President Trump said at a press conference on May 31, adding that a specific election expert wasn’t allowed to testify on certain issues related to the trial.
Some legal experts have questioned whether Judge Juan Merchan’s instructions to the jury were unfairly biased toward a conviction.
While Mr. Johnson’s remarks suggest he’s calling for the Supreme Court to step in before the New York appeals court has had a chance to weigh in on the matter, that appears to be an unlikely scenario.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told The Epoch Times that he understands and shares Mr. Johnson’s frustration at what he described as an obvious “miscarriage of justice” that took place in the Manhattan courtroom.
However, Mr. von Spakovsky said that the prospect of Supreme Court involvement before the appeals process plays out in New York state courts is not realistic.
By Tom Ozimek
