Donald Trump’s presidency was historic and turbulent, and his time once out of the White House is already too: the New York billionaire has become the first former US president to be accused of a crime.
The grand jury convened by the Manhattan prosecutor’s office to decide on the presentation of charges against Trump voted in favor this Thursday.
The crimes of which the former president is accused are not yet known, but the US press expects there to be about thirty charges related to fraud. According to the information offered by his lawyers, Trump to surrender Tuesday in New York court. The judge in charge of his case will be Juan Merchan, who was already in charge of the trial for which this year his company, the Trump Organization, was convicted of financial crimes. Merchan went late on Thursday to review the indictment written by the prosecution.
“This afternoon we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his delivery to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for his arraignment for an indictment before the Supreme Court, which remains under gag order,” the prosecution said in a statement. .
The investigation for which Trump has been charged has to do with the payment to buy the silence of a porn actress in 2016.
The porn actress Stormy Daniels
This is Stormy Daniels -her real name is Stephanie Clifford-, to whom Michael Cohen, a lawyer and grumpy handler in Trump’s shady affairs, paid $130,000 a few weeks before the November 2016 elections, in which the now former president won the White House.
Daniels claimed that he had a relationship with Trump for several months in 2006, when he was married for the third time to his current wife, Melania, and they just had a son.
Trump came from suffering a sex scandal with the publication of a video of the program ‘Access Hollywood’, in which he was caught with an open microphone bragging about unsolicited groping of women. The goal was to avoid further doubt among the conservative electorate about the Republican candidate.
Trump’s lawyer has already been convicted
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to various crimes related to this payment, within an agreement with the authorities for which he was sentenced to several years in prison – he served three, mostly under house arrest – and for which he cooperated in the investigation against Trump.
The charges filed against Cohen at the time were for violation of the electoral financing law, forgery of financial documents and tax evasion, among others, and it is likely that those that Trump will face are along those lines.
“If that crime was enough to get me charged, fined, convicted, and sent to prison, Why should I be different from Donald Trump?», Cohen reacted in an interview on CNN.
Great political impact
This historic impeachment of Trump has a major political impact. In addition to being a former president, the New York tycoon is a Republican candidate for next year’s presidential election and a clear favorite so far in the polls.
As soon as the accusation was made known, Republicans and Democrats were divided between those who accused the investigation of “political motivation” and those who defended that everyone has to answer to the law.
Trump has defended, as with the rest of the investigations that have followed him since he arrived at the White House, that the case promoted by the New York prosecutor’s office is a “witch hunt.”
Last Saturday, March 18, when the leaks from the prosecution pointed out that the grand jury had heard the majority of the witnesses and was close to a decision on the indictment, Trump went to his social network, Truth Social, to announce that it would be arrested the following Tuesday. He also called to “protest” to “recover our country.”
It was a message with unmistakable echoes of the days and weeks leading up to the tragic and embarrassing assault on the Capitol on January 6, 20231 by a mob of his supporters, and the affair left the press and the country on edge.
Neither one thing nor the other happened. The accusation has taken almost two weeks to be known and the protests before the announcement – in front of the Manhattan courts, around his residence in Florida – were anecdotal.
The Prosecutor’s Office, entrenched by the Police
We will have to see what the reaction to the accusation is now. This Thursday night, the vicinity of the prosecutor’s office building, in southern Manhattan, where the New York headquarters of the judiciary are concentrated, a step away from the Brooklyn Bridge, were taken over by the police, who have had weeks to prepare a security device for an eventual arrest.
The arrest procedure must be the conventional one: they will read the ‘Miranda warning’ – “you have the right to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you…” -, they will take your fingerprints and a mugshot. He will have the escort of the Secret Service at all times – the body in charge of the security of presidents and former presidents – and it will be necessary to see if handcuffs are placed on him and if he transcends an image from that moment.
Rumors have been rife in recent weeks about how Trump will face his prosecution: whether he will avoid any image that sounds weak, as he has always avoided, or whether he will use the arrest as a political platform.
“The photo of his police record will be a defining moment in the politics of this generation,” Gavin Wax, president of the New York Republican Youth Club, told this newspaper at a rally before the courts.
The photo, a “poster” for the 2024 elections
As soon as the accusation was made known, Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor of Law at Harvard and a conservative analyst, assured that this photo will be the “campaign poster” for 2024.
So far, the turmoil of the past two weeks over the imminence of the impeachment has shot Trump up in the polls. The former president of the United States has opened a gap with Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and who is considered his main rival, in the latest poll published by Fox News and prepared last weekend, a week after Trump announce his arrest.
The survey gives the New York billionaire 54% of support among Republican voters in primaries, well above the 43% that the same poll gave him in the previous month. With this, he distances himself from DeSantis, who has not yet announced his candidacy but it is assumed that he will: 24% say they will vote for him, compared to 28% in February.
The indictment will also serve to fill Trump’s campaign coffers. The candidate took advantage of the news to redouble the requests for donations to the millions of his followers: “The Deep State will use anything at its disposal to end the political movement that puts you as a priority,” the message said. “2024 will forever be the year we save our republic.”
In addition to this investigation, there are three other federal cases open against Trump: in Georgia about the campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 elections, in Washington about his role in the assault on the Capitol and a third about the retention of classified documents. .
