President Joe Biden recently delivered one of the more forceful addresses of his campaign on Friday amid serious concerns members of his party have about his candidacy via Mediaite.
Following a poor debate performance a couple of weeks ago and subsequent shaky interviews, more than a dozen Democratic members of Congress have called on Biden to drop his reelection bid. Plenty of others have expressed their misgivings in private.
At a rally in Detroit, Biden was defiant and told the crowd to raucous applause, “I am running!”
He also made the case against his opponent Donald Trump. The former president has been embroiled in a series of legal woes. In separate cases, he has been convicted in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, found liable for defrauding the state of New York, found liable for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll, and found liable for defaming her.
Trump is also under criminal indictment in two federal cases and a state case in Georgia after he tried to overturn the 2020 election results. The feds have also charged him with retaining classified documents after leaving office.
“We’re going to say who he is, what he intends to do,” Biden told the crowd. “Folks, Donald Trump is a convicted criminal. Convicted!”
The crowd chanted, “Lock him up!”
“He was convicted by a jury of his peers of 34 felonies for paying hush money to a porn star and hiding it from voters in 2016,” he continued. “Donald Trump was found liable for sexual assault by a judge, who told us not to be fooled by Trump brushing it off. Here’s what the judge wrote. Quote, the judge in that case wrote, quote, ‘Mr. Trump attempted to minimize sexual abuse, finding it frivolous. Mr. Trump raped her.’ That’s the judge’s language, not mine. Raped her, as many people understand the word rape.”
It should be noted that it was a Manhattan jury – not a judge – that found Trump civilly liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll. The jury declined to find Trump liable for rape.
However, in a filing, Judge Lewis Kaplan noted that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s, though he did not do so by using the exact words, “Mr. Trump raped her.” (Kaplan used the words in the filing to recall his jury instructions, i.e., “In order to establish that Mr. Trump raped her, Ms. Carroll must prove each of two elements by a preponderance of the evidence.”)
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan said. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
