A New York jury deliberated for 9½ hours over two days before convicting Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

After the verdict, California’s Republican leaders quickly cast doubt on the verdict’s legitimacy and argued it would boost Trump’s chances of reelection in November.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said that Trump’s “only ‘crime’ is running against Joe Biden in 2024.”

Jessica Millan Patterson, the chair of the California Republican Party, said the prosecution was “a politically motivated case brought by a far-left district attorney” and that the guilty verdict “never should have happened.”

San Diego-area Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) called the verdict and the trial “a disgrace.”

Democrats, by contrast, praised the verdict as proof of the American legal system functioning as it should. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who is running for Senate, said that “the rule of law prevailed” despite Trump’s efforts to “distract, delay and deny.”

In California’s most hotly contested congressional races, though, few wanted to publicly tangle with the question of Trump’s conviction.

Representatives for Reps. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills), Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach), Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita), David Valadao (R-Hanford) and John Duarte (R-Modesto) did not return requests for comment. Nor did representatives for Matt Gunderson, who is challenging Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano) in coastal Orange and San Diego counties, or Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln, who is running against Rep. Josh Harder (D-Tracy) in the Central Valley.

A representative for Republican Steve Garvey, who is running for Senate against Schiff, said he had no comment on the verdict.

One exception was Scott Baugh, who is running to flip the coastal Orange County seat held by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine). Baugh, the former chair of the Orange County GOP, characterized Trump’s trial as a political prosecution and said the verdict “should surprise no one.”

“A politically motivated prosecutor and a hostile judge set the trial up for so many prejudicial errors,” Baugh said in a prepared statement. “President Trump will have his opportunity to appeal and I am confident that a fair hearing will expose and resolve these issues.”

And longtime Riverside Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who is fighting to retain his once-safe seat in a now-competitive swing district, said in a statement on Thursday evening that Trump’s prosecution was political — but his comment was more muted than the loudest GOP voices.

Calvert said that Americans who believe that “justice should be blind to politics” should be “concerned” by the trial’s outcome. He continued: “It’s alarming that our criminal justice system continues to be taken advantage of by partisan prosecutors who want to use the power of their office to influence our democratic elections.”

Whether to lock arms with Trump has been a fraught question for Republicans in California for nearly a decade, but especially this year. Republicans hold such a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives that a handful of hyper-competitive races in the Golden State could determine which party controls the chamber. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated 10 California races as competitive.

Remaining silent on the verdict makes sense for Republicans in those competitive battleground districts, said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.

“You’ll notice that the loudest voices supporting Trump on this tend to be Republicans in very safe seats,” Schnur said. “Candidates who need to reach swing voters don’t have that luxury.”

One challenge for candidates, said UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser, is that partisan allegiances determine how voters viewed the trial.

Polling has found that Democrats overwhelmingly saw the trial as fair, while only a tiny percentage of Republicans agreed. Independents were evenly split. A Trump-like message about a rigged, unfair trial that might resonate with a candidate’s Republican base could also turn off independents, Kousser said.

“Anyone trying to win a November race in a competitive district needs to worry about both mobilizing their base through more Trump-like rhetoric, but also the cost of alienating the middle,” he said.

Rob Stutzman, a GOP strategist who isn’t involved in any congressional races, said that while the verdict can be used as a tool by both parties to turn out voters in November, it’s a “touchy subject.”

“You may have independents in congressional seats who are indifferent to the verdict, but don’t necessarily want to see Republican incumbents defending Trump or decrying the verdict,” Stutzman said.

But Shawn Steel, who represents California on the Republican National Committee and is married to Steel, of Orange County, said the verdict will have “absolutely no impact” on California’s House races.

“The White House got the verdict they planned years ago,” Steel said. “The Manhattan jurors who convicted Trump did it out of malice and hate. Today’s verdict, along with the not-guilty verdict of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, proved the steep decline of trust in the American criminal justice.”

Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney who also represents California on the Republican National Committee and whose law firm represents the Trump campaign, said Californians are more concerned with quality-of-life issues, such as homelessness, crime and illegal immigration than they are with the trial.

“People are fed up,” she said. “People are much more motivated in this election to vote because things are getting bad here in California.”

While California Republican House candidates were largely quiet, some of their allies in other states, such as Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake and vice presidential hopeful Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, were not.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” Trump told reporters after leaving the courtroom. “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people.”

The Biden campaign said Thursday’s verdict showed that the law applied to everyone, but warned that the only way to keep Trump out of the White House is voting in November.

“Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said. “The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater. He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on Day One’ and calling for our Constitution to be ‘terminated’ so he can regain and keep power.”

In the wake of Trump’s conviction, Democrats seized upon 23 vulnerable House Republicans who had endorsed the former president, including Duarte, Garcia, Calvert and Steel.

“House Republicans have continued to put Donald Trump first and the American people last,” said Courtney Rice, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Their districts deserve better than their cult-like adherence to a wannabe dictator. Each and every one of them should rescind their endorsement, but won’t.”

Trump’s trial, which began in April in New York City, was one of four felony cases that Trump was facing, though it was thought to be the only one likely to see a trial before the November election.

The verdict hinged on whether Trump falsified business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment that Michael Cohen — Trump’s lawyer and, later, a witness for the prosecution — made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged she’d had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade prior.

Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg had to convince the jury that Trump not only commanded Cohen to make the payments, but that he did so in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, rather than to shield his family from the story. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied the sexual encounter with Daniels; Cohen testified that he had been deeply involved in the scheme.

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The suits allege that the ex-deputy, Christian Phillip Heidecker, had a relationship with an employee of the company that supplies equipment for the county’s house arrest program and that she knew about his extortion of women serving sentences.

Heidecker, 32, pleaded guilty to 13 counts of extortion, bribery, dissuading a witness and engaging in a sex act as a detention officer. He was sentenced to five years in prison earlier this month in a plea deal directly to a judge. Prosecutors had asked for the maximum 12-year sentence, as did victims and their attorneys who were at the hearing.

Attorneys Denisse Gastelum and Christian Contreras said the judge’s refusal to impose the maximum sentence sent the wrong message to other offenders and to victims they believe have yet to come forward.

“We all received a message from Riverside County that sex abuse victims don’t matter and that women’s rights don’t matter,” Gastelum said Thursday. “Despite 18 felony counts, Heidecker was sentenced to five years in prison. That tells sexual predators working for the government that they can do whatever they want.”

In the newly filed lawsuits, Gastelum and Contreras are claiming constitutional violations, failure to intervene, municipal liability, negligence, sexual assault and more against not only Heidecker, the county and its department, but Sheriff Chad Bianco, Correctional Sgt. Jessica Yelenich, and the company that provides electronic monitoring, Sentinel Offender Services.

Spokespeople for the sheriff’s department could not immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuits Thursday.

Claims of ‘hush money’

The civil suits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, had been the topic of some controversy in the weeks after Heidecker was arrested by his own department. In late September, three lawyers came forward claiming their clients had been paid to sign agreements to not sue the county over Heidecker’s crimes.

The “hush money” scheme, as the lawyers called it, unfolded simultaneously with the department’s criminal investigation of the deputy, who was employed in the department’s electronic monitoring program, county records show.

Gastelum, Contreras, and two of their clients who were not identified due to the nature of the allegations, were present at a press conference Thursday in Riverside, where they detailed how, in their words, the county’s lawyers ambushed the victims before Heidecker’s arrest.

Most of the women, who were then in custody on the county’s house arrest program, were called to meet with investigators only to find that lawyers representing the county were also there. The women did not have their own attorneys present who could advise them on whether to sign the agreements, thereby waiving their right to seek more money and other corrective actions in lawsuits.

Brooke Federico, a Riverside County spokesperson, said the county holds its 25,000 employees to the highest professional standards. She disputed the lawyers’ characterization of the agreements as a hush-money scheme, instead saying they were ordinary settlements.

“Pre-litigation settlements do not contain non-disclosure agreements,” Federico said. “To characterize any pre-litigation settlements as an effort to buy silence is a clear mischaracterization.”

Gastelum and Contreras advance that claim in adding Yelenich to the case, saying she worked with an attorney representing the county, Nicole Roggeveen, to orchestrate a “plan to cover up the sexual abuse and to prevent the public from hearing the victims’ accounts,” according to the complaint.

Gastelum described how criminal investigators interviewed Heidecker at his home on Sept. 1, 2023, but didn’t arrest him until Sept. 15. In the interim, the victims were called by the department. One, who was identified as K.P., said she was called into a station after being told that her ankle monitor had malfunctioned. There, instead, she was questioned about Heidecker and compelled to sign a 10-page agreement she said she didn’t understand. She asked if she could go outside to discuss it with her mother, but was told she couldn’t.

Another victim, Y.V., said she was called by Roggeveen, who told her “she was trying to help me and that she was not working with the sheriff’s department.” She agreed to meet with the lawyer at a playground. When she arrived, she said, there were multiple people in sheriff’s department uniforms. She said she felt betrayed and helpless.

“They did the same thing Heidecker did,” she said Thursday. “They made us feel afraid and feel threatened if we did not cooperate with signing their documents. If we didn’t do what they wanted us to do, they’d take us back to jail.”

More allegations

Sentinel Offender Services and one of its employees, Karisma Vaca, are also sued as they were obligated to ensure the protection and safety of inmates being monitored on their equipment. The complaint alleges Heidecker sent Vaca sexually explicit texts that suggested the two had a relationship and that Vaca knew about his extortion of the women on the house arrest program.

The civil lawyers further revealed the existence of a video they claim shows Heidecker had a history of sexual deviancy, namely that he and other sheriff’s department employees appeared in a video joking about male genitalia while in uniform and featuring footage shot within a county jail. The lawyers claim the department and county previously knew about the video and did nothing about it, saying that it had been the subject of an internal affairs investigation.

“He was using his title and his uniform to make this video,” Contreras said Thursday. “Not only was it very sexual, they were making this inside the jail. They all should have been fired on the spot.”

The plaintiffs, who were on the Riverside Alternative Sentencing Program, were given a chance to serve their time outside of the jail while the criminal cases against them were resolved. To be admitted to the program, they were required to sign agreements. If those agreements were violated, they would be reincarcerated. The suits claim Heidecker preyed on the women while the threat of being sent back to jail loomed.

The civil suits formally alleged what the attorneys had long said, that Heidecker had victimized more people than those identified in the criminal case against him. He was convicted of extorting four women, while seven civil suits were filed.

With his plea coming about six months after his arrest, Heidecker’s criminal case moved rapidly through the Riverside County Superior Court. Prosecutors presented hundreds of text messages seized from his personal and work phones, which evidenced how he compelled women he was monitoring to send him sexually graphic material in exchange for more lenient house arrest terms.

Over several hearings, victims described how they were at first in disbelief of the deputy’s advances and then alarmed about what he had the power and willingness to do to them should they not comply. Most said they feared they would be sent back to jail and for their safety, as Heidecker knew their location at all times.

Beyond these lawsuits, Bianco’s department is under an ongoing civil rights investigation by the California Department of Justice, launched last year due to a record number of in-custody deaths and department uses of force.

Gastelum and Contreras both said Thursday they believe there are additional victims and urged them to come forward with more information.

“Come forward and tell us what they did to you,” Gastelum said. “Don’t let them silence you.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — Manhattan prosecutors investigating Donald Trump have convened a new grand jury to hear evidence in a years-old probe into payments made to keep the porn star Stormy Daniels quiet about an alleged sexual encounter with the former president, according to multiple news reports.

The news outlets, citing unnamed sources, reported that witnesses started testifying before the grand jury on Monday, signaling an escalation in what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has alluded to as “the next chapter” in his office’s Trump investigation.

A spokesperson for Bragg’s office declined comment. In a post to his Truth Social platform, Trump blasted Bragg as the “Radical Left Manhattan D.A.” and said the new grand jury was “a continuation of the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time.”

Grand juries have been convened before in New York to explore the possibility of criminal charges against Trump, but to date none have issued an indictment.

The Manhattan grand jury would be the latest legal threat to Trump as he ramps up his presidential campaign.

A special grand jury in Atlanta has investigated whether Trump and his allies committed any crimes while trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia. Last month, the House Jan. 6 committee voted to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for Trump’s role in sparking the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The FBI is also investigating Trump’s storage of classified documents.

The hush-money investigation in New York involves payments of $130,000 to Daniels and $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to buy their silence in the run-up to Trump’s 2016 election victory. Trump has denied having affairs with either woman.

Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, made the payment to Daniels through his own company and said he then was reimbursed by Trump. McDougal’s payment was made through the publisher of the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer, which then squelched her story in a journalistically dubious practice known as “catch-and-kill” to help Trump become president.

The New York Times reported that the National Enquirer’s former publisher, David Pecker, was spotted entering the building where the grand jury was meeting on Monday.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges that he violated campaign finance law by arranging the payouts. He served about a year in prison before being released to home confinement because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal prosecutors said Trump was aware of the payouts, but they declined to charge him with any crime.

Cohen previously told The Associated Press he recently met with Manhattan prosecutors for 2½ hours.

The Trump Organization was convicted last month of tax fraud and fined $1.6 million as punishment for an unrelated scheme in which top executives dodged personal income taxes on lavish job perks.

“Now with the trial having ended, we are now moving on to the next chapter,” Bragg told The Associated Press in an interview after the tax fraud trial.

The Trump Organization in a statement suggested that Bragg, a Democrat, was trying to undermine Trump’s fledgling 2024 presidential campaign. Reviving the investigation years after federal prosecutors had decided not to bring a case is “simply reprehensible and vindictive,” the company said.

Bragg’s predecessor as district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., also examined the hush money payments before shifting the probe’s focus to the Trump Organization’s tax and business practices.

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