Former President Donald Trump's legal team has "an automatic appeal" of his guilty verdict in a New York criminal trial, retired New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano told Newsmax on Friday.
Trump on Thursday was convicted by a jury on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump's attorney, Todd Blanche, vowed to file an appeal.
"The major part of the appeals process is that the judge did not require the jury to articulate or agree on what the so-called underlying crime was," Napolitano said on "National Report." "We all woke up this morning saying, 'Well, what was he convicted of? Donald Trump doesn't know what he was convicted of. The judge doesn't know what the underlying crime was. Maybe the jurors do, but they didn't tell us."
Napolitano said that due to "the way the statute is worded, it allows the jurors to pick from a menu of underlying crimes, and they don't all need to agree. But federal law requires that the jurors agree on every element of every crime unanimously in order for there to be … a guilty verdict."
Napolitano added: "That, in my view, is an automatic appeal" for Trump's legal team, adding that "there are a lot of other … errors that the defense made, which is easy to find in hindsight in fairness to them."
Napolitano also said he's "saddened" by the verdict "because this defendant has been my friend for 37 or 38 years, and the four years he was in the White House, he called me many, many times on all kinds of issues, legal, constitutional and non-legal. And it's just hurtful to me that this is happening."
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