Watch How Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC Covered the Trump Verdict: ‘The Former President of the United States, Now a Convicted Felon’

AP Photo/Seth Wenig, Pool

The historic conviction of former President Donald Trump resulted in breaking coverage from all three major cable news networks.

A Manhattan jury found the former president guilty on all 34 counts for allegedly falsifying business documents regarding hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election season.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused the presumptive Republican nominee for president of making these payments at the time via his ex-attorney Michael Cohen to cover up an alleged affair with the adult film actress. Following the verdict, network cameras captured Trump’s statement where he claimed the verdict was “rigged” and attacked Judge Juan Merchan.

Each network read out the guilty counts as they came in live to their studios followed by commentary from anchors and legal analysts.

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow was the first to react to Trump’s guilty verdict, calling the conviction an “irreducible verdict” while noting the next test for the country is if “we will stand by the rule of law and recognize this is a fair process.”

“This is a definitive. And you know, this is an irreducible verdict. He can appeal. I’m sure he will appeal. But this is everything that the prosecution asked for. From a jury that, by all accounts, took this thing very, very seriously,” Maddow noted. “The test here for us as a country, is not about what happens on appeal, and it’s not about what happens in sentencing. The test for us now, as a country, is whether or not this former president and his allies will have succeeded in trying to undermine the rule of law so that people reject this as a legitimate function of the rule of law in our country.”

She added, “The people involved in bringing this case have been threatened and intimidated and had everything brought to bear on against them in a way that was designed to delegitimize this process in the eyes of the American people. It is now in the hands of the American people to decide if we will accept those efforts, or whether we will stand by the rule of law and recognize this is a fair process.”

CNN anchor Jake Tapper led the network’s initial coverage of Trump’s guilty verdict by reading out the jury’s decision before highlighting, “the former president of the United States, now a convicted felon.”

“An unbelievable moment in American history,” Tapper told CNN viewers. “They, the jurors, are now being asked, about their agreement with these charges, and they are responding, ‘Yes.’  Trump has a frowned expression on his face as the verdict reading is completed. He is not moving before — the former president of the United States, now a convicted felon, having been found guilty of 34 felony charges by a jury of his peers in Manhattan, New York, the court officer is asked if either party wants the jury polled.”

Meanwhile, after reading the guilty verdicts, Fox News legal analyst Andy McCarthy was first to react to the historic moment. McCarthy slammed the case against Trump as a “political exercise” while referring to Bragg as a “progressive” Democrat.

“It’s a historic trial of a former president of the United States by his partisan adversaries. Whatever you think of the results, it’s inconceivable in New York that anyone else other than Donald Trump would ever been indicted in this way by Alvin Bragg, the elected progressive Democratic district attorney who campaigned on the fact that he would go after Donald Trump, that he had a history of going after Donald Trump.”

McCarthy concluded, “This is a very political exercise, and you have to say that it accomplished what it set out to accomplish.”

Watch the clips above.