Donald Trump was fined $9,000 on Tuesday for publicly attacking witnesses and jurors on the sidelines of his criminal trial in New York, where the judge threatened to incarcerate him if he did it again.
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Donald Trump “is warned that the Court will not tolerate the continuation of willful violations of its orders and that, if necessary and appropriate, it will impose a prison sentence”, writes Judge Juan Merchan in his decision rendered upon resumption debates.
The magistrate sentenced the former President of the United States, present in the courtroom for this third week of trial, to a fine of $1,000 per violation – nine in total -, the maximum allowed by the law, and ordered his attacks removed from his Truth Social network or campaign site.
Getty Images via AFP
In his decision, the judge concedes that the sum is entirely affordable for a billionaire like Donald Trump and considers that, under his conditions, “prison could be necessary”.
Since the start of the trial on April 15, prosecutors had requested several times that Donald Trump be sanctioned for his repeated violations of the ban on attacking key witnesses in the case, such as his former lawyer Michael Cohen or the former star of Stormy Daniels porn films, or even to the juries, which he implies are not impartial.
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Even before the judge ruled on these first violations, prosecutors raised new ones, which will be addressed in a hearing on Thursday, with possible new sanctions for Donald Trump.
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When he arrived in court on Tuesday, the Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election once again presented himself as a victim of legal proceedings “led by the White House and Democratic judges and prosecutors”. And he again called on the judge, whom he regularly describes as “corrupt”, to recuse himself.
The first former president in U.S. history to face criminal trial, Donald Trump, 77, faces conviction and, in theory, up to prison time in the case, one of four in which he is indicted.
It is also probably the only one that will be decided before the November 5 election, during which he dreams of revenge on Joe Biden, after his departure from the White House in January 2021 in chaos.
Empty shell
He is being prosecuted for 34 falsifications of accounting documents which allegedly served to conceal a payment to cover up a potential sex scandal in the home stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign.
A sum of $130,000 was paid to Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about a sexual relationship she claimed to have had with him in 2006, when he was already married. A relationship he denies. The prosecution speaks of a “plot” to “distort” the election when Donald Trump’s defense sees it as the normal functioning of democracy.
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After a first week devoted to jury selection, the debates focused last week on the lengthy testimony of a former tabloid boss, who set the scene for the case. David Pecker, who owned The National Enquirerrecounted how he put himself at the service of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 by purchasing the exclusive rights to two other testimonies likely to cause scandals.
All after a meeting in the summer of 2015 with Donald Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen. But David Pecker, who had not been reimbursed, refused to pay Stormy Daniels when her case arose.
Archive photo, AFP
On Tuesday, the hearings were to resume with the testimony of Michael Cohen’s former banker. He has already started saying that his client asked him to open an account for a new company, in fact an empty shell which was used to pay Stormy Daniels.
The lawyer was then reimbursed, in 2017, by Donald Trump’s business group, the Trump Organization. These expenses had been recorded as “legal costs”, hence the prosecution for accounting falsifications.
At the start of the trial, the judge listed the names of around forty potential witnesses, including Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, but also one of Donald Trump’s former political strategists, Steve Bannon, or his former White House communications director, Hope Hicks.
