Robert De Niro appears outside court during closing arguments in Trump trial

(CNN) — After months of ignoring or mocking former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial, the Biden campaign on Tuesday decided for the first time to hold a news conference about Trump’s record outside the courthouse where closing arguments were being held.

The program, which featured a surprise appearance by actor Robert De Niro, who became a campaign spokesman, was not intended to specifically discuss aspects of the trial, the president’s team stressed. But it was undoubtedly intended to draw attention to the criminal defendant who was in a nearby building.

“If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss goodbye these freedoms that we all take for granted,” De Niro said as protesters chanted and car alarms sounded in the background. “And the elections … forget about them, that’s it. It’s done, if it comes to that, I can tell you right now: It will never go away. It will never go away.”

At first, Biden’s team was cautious about doing or saying anything that would appear to politicize the former president’s trial. In their view, Trump’s trial would speak for itself, reintroducing the former president and the chaos surrounding him to voters who may have overlooked him.

However, some Biden allies have pushed back on that idea, suggesting that Trump has already done too much to politicize his legal cases and that Biden — if he wants to capture voters’ attention — would do well to intervene.

Tuesday’s event was a validation of the second viewpoint.

“The entire media has been camped out here, day in and day out,” campaign communications director Michael Tyler said, explaining the decision to address reporters outside the lower Manhattan courthouse.

In addition to De Niro, who recently narrated an ad in which he attacked Trump, there were two police officers present who were present at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 and were attacked by pro-Trump rioters: Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn.

“At the end of the day, this election is about Donald Trump and his view of the office of president of the United States, not as a public servant who answers to those elected, answers to the people who elected him, but as an authoritarian who answers to and only serves himself,” Fanone said.

Trump’s top advisers, Jason Miller, Steven Cheung and Carolyn Levitt, spoke to reporters immediately after the press conference. Miller attacked the two-time Oscar winner.
“The best thing they can do is cast a washed-up actor,” Miller said.

He described Trump’s attacks on Judge Juan Merchan as “corrupt” and “confrontational” and argued that the case was “complete nonsense”.

President Biden’s team sees an opportunity to be more aggressive in painting Trump as a threat to democracy once the trial is over, ahead of the June 27 CNN debate.

On everything from campaign ads to the messaging and rhetoric coming from the president himself to the development of campaign infrastructure, one person familiar with the campaign’s thinking said, Biden’s team believes that once Trump’s trial — and its aggressive media coverage — is over, there will be more space and opportunity to present their case to the American people before November.

Biden campaign officials are still grappling with the reality, this person said, that a large portion of the population still does not see that the election on Election Day will be between Biden and Trump.

And while the campaign will have to calibrate its messaging and strategy based on how exactly Trump’s trial ends, this person stressed that, in the end, the thrust of its case against the former president won’t change whether Trump is convicted or not. But.

De Niro offered the main theme of that message on Tuesday. He attacked the former president as a “tyrant” and a “coward” and told reporters that, as New Yorkers, they have tolerated the former real estate mogul as “yet another dirty real estate scammer, posing as a cheap playboy who gets into the newspapers.”

And he said the stakes in the November election are what motivated him to join the campaign in a new ad released last week.

“That’s why I needed to be involved and I wanted to be involved in the new Biden-Harris ad, because it shows Trump’s violence and reminds us that he will use violence against anyone who stands in the way of his megalomania and greed,” De Niro said. “Do you think Trump has ever been punched or punched? This guy ran and hid in the White House bunker when there were protesters outside, absolutely not. He doesn’t have blood on his hands. No, he doesn’t. His hands are dirty. He directs the mafia to do his dirty work for him.”

The actor Robert De Niro assured that he felt it was “important” to be present at the door of the New York court where the criminal trial of former president Donald Trump is taking place this Tuesday and that it was the result of a request from the president. Joe Biden’s team.

“The Biden administration asked me to go, and I thought, ‘OK, I’ll go.’ And I’ll say something,” he told CNN ahead of the start of the Tribeca Film Festival.

He added, “I don’t want to do this, but I don’t see any other way to deal with it.”

De Niro has long been a critic of Trump. The president’s team told CNN that the actor appeared outside the courthouse on Tuesday but did not specifically discuss aspects of the trial.

“If this guy comes back, it’s going to be hell,” De Niro told CNN on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s going to be four years, there’s going to be fights and brawls and civil strife and all that. … I’d like to think that the country will straighten itself out, but at what cost because of this madman.”

As CNN reported Friday, the Biden campaign effectively kicked off the next phase by launching a bombastic new ad called “Snapped,” narrated by De Niro.

“When Trump was president, we knew he was out of control,” De Niro says of a shot of Trump behind the Resolute desk. “Then he lost the 2020 election and went broke.”

The ad describes Trump trying “desperately” to cling on to power while showing footage of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, with the phrases “dictator” and “abolish the Constitution” flashing on the screen, followed by a video of Trump saying: “If I’m not here if you’re not elected it’s going to be a bloodbath.”

Fanone, a former Washington Metropolitan Police officer who was attacked during the January 6 insurrection, said he was “just one representative of the hundreds of police officers who were attacked that day by Donald Trump supporters inspired by his lies. I will continue to urge my fellow Americans today to attack their fellow Americans, to attack police officers.”

Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer, called Trump “the greatest threat today to our democracy and the safety of communities across the country.”

“It has encouraged and continues to encourage political violence. We are called traitors today. We were all called traitors on January 6 for doing our job,” Dunn said. “Political violence is never acceptable, but you have a presidential candidate who defends it, who encourages it, who supports it. We cannot allow that.”

On Tuesday, Biden’s re-election campaign announced it was recruiting police officers who served at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to campaign for Biden in battleground states in the coming weeks.

Sergeant Aquilino Gonell and Officer Danny Hodges also plan to join Dunn in telling voters that Trump is a threat to democracy and their fundamental rights as Americans. Dunn and Gonell were injured during the attack on the Capitol and have since retired from the Capitol Police. Hodges will continue to work at the Washington Metropolitan Police Department.

— CNN’s Kate Sullivan and Marianne Garvey contributed to this report.