Donald Trump LIVE updates after historic guilty verdict: Former president tells Biden to ‘buckle up’ as he returns to campaign trail

Hillary Clinton appeared triumphant as she delivered a not-so-subtle response to her former political rival Donald Trump being found guilty in a criminal trial.

‘Anything going on today?’ she said with a wry smile as she took to the podium at the Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards in Washington DC, shortly after the jury reached its verdict in Trump’s hush money trial.

Her audience immediately responded with applause and laughter as they caught her apparent reference to the trial in Manhattan, with Clinton assuring them: ‘Well, I have to tell you, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here.’

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., joined Fox News to talk about voter’s reactions to Trump’s felony convictions, saying Americans are ‘disgusted’ with the outcome.

‘It doesn’t matter whether I am in a blue state or a red state, people are disgusted by this,’ Johnson told the hosts of Fox & Friends.

‘They see exactly what’s happening, old charges, a tainted judge.’

‘This judge on this case in Manhattan was an open Biden supporter, an open activist, a political activist.’

‘And no one cared about that. So the double standard is clear, everybody sees it.’

Melania Trump has been silent in the wake of Donald Trump’s conviction but one of her top former advisers predicts she wasn’t surprised by her husband’s behavior.

‘Melania knew exactly who she married. She knew that this was a transactional marriage. She became a top model. He became a loving doting father, and it set them up for their win for the White House,’ Stephanie Winston Wolkoff told CNN.

Wolkoff worked with Melania in the White House in the early years of the Trump administration. The two had a friendship going back to their New York days but fell out during Trump’s presidency. They no longer speak and Wolkoff wrote a tell-all memoir about her time with the Trumps.

At a time when top GOP officials including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are rallying behind Trump, there were almost no calls to remove him from the Republican presidential ticket.

Trump is set to be nominated at the Republican nomination in Milwaukee, having dominated the primaries even while facing four criminal trials and leading President Biden in the polls.

One exception to the wagon circling is Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who blasted his former boss in a 2020 book.

‘Today’s verdict is a fire-bell in the night’, Bolton posted late Thursday. ‘The Republican Party now has one last chance to change course, and not nominate a convicted felon for President.’

Cara Mund, who won the Miss America contest in 2018 and is running for North Dakota’s only seat in Congress, piled into Trump for his felonies.

‘Proud to be the ONLY ND Republican Candidate not worshiping a convicted felon during this election,’ the pageant winner posted on X.

‘I’ll be the voice of ND, not Donald Trump.’

‘I’ll be the leader who helps move the party back to law and order,’ her statement continued. ‘I’ll be on the right side of history!’

Mund ran unsuccessfully for office against Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., in 2022.

The eminent lawyer, who has attended the trial, said no judge in New York wanted to be ‘responsible for freeing Donald Trump’.

Dershowitz told Steve Bannon’s War Room:

These are people with their families. These are people who don’t want to be “Dershowitzed”. People know what happened to me when I defended Donald Trump on the floor of the Senate. Nobody on Martha’s Vineyard would speak to me.

Harvard Law School canceled me after I’d been there for 50 years, and judge’s don’t want that to happen to them. So I am not encouraged that he’ll get a fair appeal.

Prime Minster Rishi Sunak dodged and said the case was ‘not my focus’.

However, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer gave a fuller response.

He respected the decision of the ‘independent court’ but said he would work with ‘whoever’ is elected U.S. President in November.

Melania Trump remains silent on the verdict.

It’s also unclear where Melania Trump is located. This time of year the Trump family is usually camped out at their place on the former president’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Mar-a-Lago is closed for the season but Melania has private rooms there she could stay in. Or she could be at Trump Tower in New York. Or she could be anywhere.

Her office did not respond to DailyMail.com’s repeated requests for comment.

The former first lady and son Barron are the only members of the Trump to either not appear in court with the former president or to post supportive messages on social media.

Don Jr., Eric and Tiffany all made courtroom appearances. Ivanka Trump posted a four-word message on Instagram Thursday night in support of her father: ‘I love you dad.’

Donald Trump squandered a ‘winnable case’ where he could have got a hung jury or escaped with only a misdemeanor, legal experts have argued.

The former president was found guilty by a jury of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the so-called ‘hush money’ trial in New York.

Veteran lawyers argue District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case had weaknesses – despite 200 pieces of evidence and weeks of witness testimony.

But Trump’s lawyers failed to exploit them, confusing the jury by fighting every aspect of the indictment and refusing to offer the option of a lesser charge.

The Kremlin said on Friday that Donald Trump’s guilty verdict showed all legal and illegal means were being used in the United States to get rid of political rivals

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, pictures with Putin, said:

If we speak about Trump, the fact that there is simply the elimination, in effect, of political rivals by all possible means, legal and illegal, is obvious.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has a message for Biden:

Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats confined President Trump to a courtroom for more than eight hours a day for more than six weeks, and he’s still winning.

Now that he is fully back on the campaign trial, Biden and the Democrats better buckle up.

Donald Trump squandered a ‘winnable case’ where he could have got a hung jury or escaped with only a misdemeanor, legal experts have argued.

The former president was found guilty by a jury of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the so-called ‘hush money’ trial in New York.

Veteran lawyers argue District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case had weaknesses – despite 200 pieces of evidence and weeks of witness testimony.

But Trump’s lawyers failed to exploit them, confusing the jury by fighting every aspect of the indictment and refusing to offer the option of a lesser charge.

Bill O’Reilly has said president Joe Biden should pardon his son Hunter and Donald Trump in order to heal the nation.

‘President Biden should pardon Donald Trump of any and all crimes and suggest publicly that governor [Kathy] Hochul do the same thing,’ O’Reilly told Chris Cuomo.

‘And then … President Biden should pardon his son Hunter. That would throw the whole acrimonious system into absolute chaos.’

O’Reilly said that while Biden could ‘bring down the level of hatred… he won’t, because he doesn’t have the “fiber” of Gerald Ford.’

Trump will face sentencing on July 11, just four days before the beginning of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where the party is set to nominate Trump for President a third time.

Here are some of the key takeaways from Thursday’s trial.