Biden’s Campaign Trolls Trump Outside the Courthouse, in a First

NEW YORK — After first ignoring former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial, then beginning to make sly insinuations about how he was “free on Wednesdays,” the court’s day off, President Joe Biden’s campaign has jumped in with a stunt designed to emphasize the unprecedented situation of a major party’s presidential candidate awaiting a felony verdict.

The Biden campaign on Tuesday dispatched Robert De Niro, the actor whose voice narrates the campaign’s latest ad, along with Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, two former U.S. Capitol Police officers who have since become spokespeople for the Democratic effort to attack Trump over his role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, to hold a news conference outside the courthouse in Manhattan where Trump’s trial was concluding.

De Niro said that Trump had engaged in a “coward’s violence” after the 2020 election.

“He directs the mob to do his dirty work for him,” he said.

The news conference was the sort of thing the Trump campaign would have done from the beginning if the political situation were reversed.

The Biden campaign has for weeks kept to the letter of the president’s directive to not address the criminal charges Trump faces or offer commentary on the trial, but its decision to dispatch surrogates to the Manhattan courthouse while the former president’s lawyer was delivering his closing argument was hardly subtle.

Although De Niro and the two former police officers did not address Trump’s Manhattan trial — he is charged with falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to a porn actor before the 2016 election — they sought to draw attention to his actions that led to the events of Jan. 6, which are the subject of another federal criminal case pending against Trump.

De Niro also mentioned the civil case last year in which a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, a former magazine writer. In January, the former president was ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll. The Biden campaign has rarely discussed that case or the verdict against Trump.

“Just a couple of blocks from here a jury found him liable for sexual abuse,” De Niro said.

The Biden campaign sought to argue that bringing De Niro and the two Capitol Police officers to Trump’s trial was not a commentary on the case but on the news media scrum gathered to cover it.

“We’re not here today because of what’s going on over there,” Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director, told the assembled reporters outside the courthouse. “We’re here today because you all are here.”

With a number of demonstrators stationed in a protest area outside the courthouse, many of the news conferences throughout the trial have been met with some level of heckling. De Niro was challenged by a man wearing a red Make America Great Again hat, who criticized his remarks and accused the Capitol Police officers of lying under oath, calling them traitors.

Trump has sought to tie together all four of his pending criminal cases and has argued baselessly that Biden is behind them all. In addition to the Manhattan trial, he is charged in separate federal cases over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, along with a Georgia case related to his push to reverse that year’s results.

The Trump campaign quickly jumped on the Biden news conference.

“The Biden folks have finally done it,” said Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign. “After months of saying that politics had nothing to do with this trial, they showed up and made it with a campaign event.”

He characterized De Niro’s involvement as a desperate reach for a campaign that needed to lift Biden’s poll numbers, referring to him as a “washed-up actor” and arguing that Biden campaign staff members at the news conference had sensed it was a bad idea to stand in the proverbial shadow of the courthouse.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said the Biden campaign was “making a political mockery” of the criminal case with its appearance.

Asked about the Biden campaign’s contention that it had held a news conference at the courthouse only because the national news media had been stationed there for weeks, Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s press secretary, responded simply: “They’re pathetic.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .