During a news conference, former President Donald Trump falsely attacked President Joe Biden, telling reporters he would appear at his federal criminal proceedings.
Closing arguments in the fraud case, led by Attorney General Letitia James and overseen by Judge Arthur Engoron, were held on Thursday, and there were a lot of unexpected pyrotechnics. Judge Engoron first hesitated to allow restrictions on Trump’s ability to speak in court, but eventually gave up, and Trump stormed the courtroom.
Outside of the courtroom, Trump also bragged about the case multiple times, repeating a well-known litany of lies. After that, he hosted a boisterous and deceptive press conference at the structure he had boasted about on 9/11.
Trump verbally attacked Biden repeatedly during his opening remarks and it included false accusations of him engineering the dozens of criminal charges.
During the Q&A portion of the presser, Trump was asked if he will similarly show up for the federal trials for election crimes and violations of The Espionage Act, and Trump tried to deflect using the markedly dissimilar Biden classified documents case:
“REPORTER: Have you made decision about whether you’re going to show up for the federal trials? You’ve showed up here in New York for your civil fraud trial. You just said you’re going to show up for the E. Jean Carroll case. Are you planning to show up in court —
TRUMP: Yeah.
REPORTER: — when they begin, whenever they begin.
TRUMP: Sure, sure
REPORTER: In that documents case and the January 6th case?
TRUMP: I would do that. Well, the documents case, I just hear where they want to try and exonerate Biden, and he didn’t have the Presidential Records Act, and I do. What I did, nothing wrong. What he did, a lot of people say, substantially wrong.
You can’t have two tiers of justice in this country. But no, I want to go to all of my trials. These are all, again, these are all set up by Biden and the Democrats. This is their — this is their new form of cheating. This is like last time, this is their new form of cheating. So far, I think it’s gone very much against them.
Yeah, please.”
