The scandal seems to be looming over American society once again and again at the hands of Donald Trump. It is that the former president called for mobilization if, as he affirms, the jury studying the evidence presented by prosecutor Alvin Bragg makes him the first former president of the United States arrested for a criminal offense, neither more nor less than for buying the silence of the porn actress Stormy Daniels with whom she had an extramarital relationship.
So far, only a handful of loyal Trump supporters, shouting “this is a witch hunt!” They demonstrated in front of the Manhattan courts, although the New York Police chose to reinforce security with barricades around the prosecutor’s office and Trump Tower (on Fifth Avenue) since yesterday afternoon.
Although it is unknown what and when the jury’s decision and the judge’s subsequent announcement will be, Trump warned last Saturday on his Truth Social account that he would surely be arrested this Tuesday, and that he would be “arrested and handcuffed as part of a blow to his pre-campaign to try to return to the presidency of the United States in 2024 ”.
Gavin Wax, the president of the young Republicans of New York who called the protest, told the AFP news agency that “we are operating with leaks, with limited information, but it is clear that they (the Justice) see President Donald Trump as a threat”.
In front of the court building, for now without confrontations, detractors of the former Republican president also manifested, such as the case of New Yorker Bob Fertek for whom Trump is a “fraud who I would like to see in the defendant’s dock.”
The case
Daniels/Trump
The court knows that the investigation into the case of the porn actress Stormy Daniels is legally complex.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, crossed paths in July 2006, when she was a 27-year-old porn diva, with Donald Trump, who was 60 at the time and a billionaire as well as a reality star. The event occurred during a golf tournament between “celebrities” near Lake Tahoe, in the western United States. The photograph showed him, the recent father of a child with his wife Melania, in a yellow shirt and a red cap; to her, in a tight black T-shirt.
What followed the photo was always up for debate and should be written up in potential, as Daniels said they spent the night together and Trump strongly denied doing so.
Then, Trump would have told him that he was “special” and offered to appear on his show The newbie, something that never materialized. Five years later, Stormy Daniels wanted to sell her testimony of her love affair to the farandulesca magazine In Touch for US$ 15,000, but despite having paid it, those responsible for the outlet gave up publishing it in the face of the threat of a lawsuit from one of the lawyers closest to Trump, Michael Cohen.
Daniels said, then, that a stranger had approached her in Las Vegas to order her to forget about Trump, something she accepted only until the real estate magnate won the Republican primaries in 2016. Cohen returned to the fray with the purchase of Silence, and Daniels said the lawyer had paid him $130,000 out of pocket under a confidentiality agreement signed on October 28. She even said that they had signed the contract with pseudonyms: Peggy Peterson and David Dennison.
Finally, in January 2018, exactly one year after Trump took office as President of the United States, the newspaper Wall Street Journal. Cohen denied everything; Daniels smiled on television sets where she was a guest. But in March, the actress petitioned the court to vacate the confidentiality agreement and began a tour called “Make America Horny Again” (“Let’s make America hot again”), parodying Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again” (“Let’s make America great again”).
Daniels rose to fame, much more when his autobiography was published shortly after (Full disclosure), in which he claimed that his night with Trump was “the least impressive” of his life.
In August 2018, Cohen admitted to making the payment to the porn actress “at the request” of Trump. For her part, Trump confirmed it, but maintaining that he had not used campaign money.
It matters little for the judicial investigation that both characters in the comic get along badly. Daniels continues to call Trump “little” and Trump refers to Daniels on social media as “horseface.” Prosecutors say Trump’s intention was to buy silence about an alleged extramarital affair. And the point is that the payment, no longer in potential, existed, so Trump may be the first ex-president of the United States charged with a criminal offense.
The investigation accelerated last week. Daniels is cooperating with prosecutors, while Trump was encouraged to testify before the jury. “Prosecutors almost never invite the target of the investigation to testify before the grand jury unless they intend to indict him,” former prosecutor Bennett Gershman told AFP.
Local authorities fear that the chaos will break out again from the assault on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, when former President Trump urged his supporters to ignore the results of the polls that gave victory to Democrat Joe Biden.
The trumpists promised on social networks to prevent their leader from being charged. The most mobilized group, “The Donald”, called for a “national strike” and, more recklessly, for a “civil war 2.0”, according to the media. Rolling Stone y Daily Beast.
As if all this were not enough to encourage tension, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador criticized the possible arrest of Donald Trump on Tuesday. “Former President Trump is declaring that they are going to arrest him, I think today, for an allegedly love affair. If that were the case, then the whole world would know that it is so that he does not appear on the electoral ballot,” said López Obrador in his usual conference morning press.
