Donald Trump on Tuesday became the first former US president to be formally detained and face criminal charges. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 charges related to the payment of silence to actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump spent about an hour in the building on Tuesday, where he was formally detained, fingerprinted, and revealed by a grand jury. Moments later, he was released and headed to Florida, where he intends to address the matter during his evening speech. The former president was not handcuffed or photographed during his detention.
The former president faced 34 felony counts of forging business documents, each of which relates to checks Trump wrote to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen for fictitious legal services. According to investigators, in fact, the checks were intended to return 130,000. dollars that Cohen paid during the 2016 election campaign to porn actress Stormy Daniels. This was to be payment for her silence regarding her alleged intimate meeting with Trump.
Although the falsification of business documents is usually not treated as a crime, but a misdemeanor, as explained by the Chief of the Manhattan Prosecutor’s Office, Alvin Bragg, it is a crime if the purpose is to cover up another crime. In this case, it’s a violation of New York’s electoral law. Prosecutors say the payment to Daniels was part of a wider deal between Trump and the publisher of the National Inquirer tabloid to “capture” and suppress negative stories about Trump during the campaign.
“This arrangement violated New York’s electoral law, which makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidate by illegal means,” Bragg said at a news conference.
Already in 2018, in the same case – and for tax fraud – a federal court sentenced Cohen to three years in prison, who made a payment on behalf of Trump. The federal prosecutor’s office, however, decided not to file charges against Trump himself. Bragg himself and his predecessor, Cyrus Vance, initially did the same, but according to Bragg, the change of mind was influenced by the emergence of new evidence.
According to Yahoo News, although New York law provides for sentences of up to four years in prison for the crimes of which Trump was accused, in the case of previously unpunished people, almost never a prison sentence is imposed.
The former president’s lawyers accused the prosecutor’s office of bias and violation of the rule of law.
“This case, these leaked allegations show us that the rule of law is dead in this country. (…) Understand that there is no scenario in which if the accused was not named Donald J. Trump, we would be here,” said Trump’s defense attorney Joe Tacopina outside the Manhattan State Courthouse.
According to reports from CNN journalists who watched the brief trial, Judge Juan Merchan decided not to enforce the ban on speaking about the case against Trump, but warned both sides against inciting and using inflammatory language.
Just before the arrest, the son of the former president, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a picture of a judge’s daughter who was supposed to be working in Joe Biden’s election campaign. Previously, Trump claimed the judge “hated” him, called prosecutor Bragg an “animal”, called for protests and suggested that charging him could result in “death and destruction”.
Small groups of Trump supporters and opponents gathered outside a courthouse in Manhattan on Tuesday, but there were no major incidents.
Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges on Tuesday. However, the former president is the target of at least three investigations in which he faces more serious charges. According to media reports, the Georgia State Attorney’s office is close to indicting him for his pressure to reverse the 2020 election. At the same time, Special Independent Federal Attorney Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s actions related to the attack on the Capitol, as well as his holding of hundreds of classified documents .
From Washington Oskar Górzyński (PAP)
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