White House officials said little on Thursday after former President Donald J. Trump was convicted of falsifying records to cover up a scandal with a porn actress, becoming America’s first ex-president to be declared a felon.
“We respect the rule of law,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, “and have no additional comment.”
The White House declined to respond to additional questions about Mr. Biden’s reaction to the verdict or how he learned about it.
The succinct statement came as President Biden spent time with his family in Rehoboth Beach on the ninth anniversary of the death of his son Beau Biden, of brain cancer. On the same day that Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records by a jury of 12 New Yorkers, Mr. Biden attended a morning service at a church in Delaware where his son is buried, before flying to Rehoboth Beach for the rest of the day. He had no public events for most of Thursday.
Mr. Biden has generally avoided talking at length about any of Mr. Trump’s other legal troubles, out of concern about fueling his false claims that the president had directed prosecutors to investigate Mr. Trump. The Biden campaign took the rare step earlier this week of dispatching a surrogate, the actor Robert De Niro, to comment on the proceedings outside the Manhattan courthouse where Mr. Trump’s trial was being held.
But for the most part, Mr. Biden has directed officials to avoid discussing Mr. Trump’s various criminal charges. The president’s aides have rather tried to draw the contrast with Mr. Trump by having Mr. Biden promote his domestic agenda while the former president was forced to attend hearings in the Manhattan courtroom.
While White House officials kept their initial reaction muted, the Biden campaign stressed to voters that a conviction was not enough to keep Mr. Trump out of the White House.
“There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box,” Michael Tyler, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement. “Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.”
