NEW YORK | This will be the first criminal trial in the history of a former president of the United States: Donald Trump was notified on Thursday that he will appear from March 25 in New York in the case of payments to silence a relationship supposedly with a pornographic actress.
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“We want delays,” declared the Republican favorite for the November presidential election upon his arrival in front of the Manhattan courthouse. “How can you run for office when you’re sitting in a court?”
“It’s just a way of harming me in the election,” he denounced, the ex-president regularly accusing the judges of being under the thumb of the Democratic camp.
Judge Juan Merchan of the New York court nevertheless rejected Donald Trump’s requests to cancel the proceedings, as desired by the Republican magnate who denounced “electoral interference” for the November presidential election.
At the same time, a Georgia judge began hearing Thursday a motion from Donald Trump’s lawyers seeking to dismiss the election interference charges against the former president, accusing the prosecutor in charge of investigating the case of having maintained a romantic relationship with a lawyer she had hired to work on this case.
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Accounting frauds
For the moment, these cases and the many others targeting Donald Trump have not damaged his credibility with the base of Republican activists and he handily won his party’s first two primaries for the presidential nomination of November, in the states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
At 77, the master of the Republicans has even turned the courts into political forums. The Republican favorite took advantage of each of his appearances in the courtrooms to portray himself, without proof, as a victim of legal machinations orchestrated by prosecutors and judges in the pay of the Democratic camp. And his legal troubles allowed him to raise millions of dollars from activists.
In New York, the 45th President of the United States is accused of having disguised the accounts of his company to hide in particular the payment of 130,000 dollars to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, just before the presidential election, so that she would keep quiet over an alleged relationship in 2006.
The Republican businessman, who was already married to Melania Trump, denied any relationship with the actress, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
Fragile file
This trial will not be the most consequential of Donald Trump’s legal troubles and observers consider the case fragile.
He is also being prosecuted in federal and Georgia state courts for his allegedly unlawful attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.
The federal trial in Washington was scheduled to start on March 4, but was postponed while a ruling was made on possible criminal immunity for the former president.
This new legal week for Donald Trump could continue on Friday, if, as a source close to the case confirmed to AFP, Judge Arthur Engoron renders his judgment in a civil trial where the ex-president is accused of having colossally inflated the value of its real estate assets in the 2010s to attract the banks.
