Candidate for a return to the White House in 2024, Donald Trump risks spending part of his campaign in court. Still being pursued as part of an investigation into his campaign in 2020, the former president will now have to deal with the confessions of one of his lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro. Targeted by seven counts, the latter pleaded guilty to the single count of forgery, during a hearing in Atlanta, capital of the state of Georgia.
He was sentenced to five years in prison, $5,000 in compensation to Georgia, 100 hours of community service and delivered a letter of apology to the voters of that state. He is essentially accused of having written and sent notes with a view to substituting the electoral votes obtained in 2020 in Georgia by Democrat Joe Biden with those of the outgoing Republican president, a maneuver at the heart of the alleged plot.
“The dominoes are starting to fall”
In total, 19 defendants, including Donald Trump and his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, are named in the indictment issued on August 14 under a Georgia law on organized crime used by the prosecutor. Fani Willis. Kenneth Chesebro will have to, in exchange for the dropping of the six other charges, testify at the future trials of the other defendants, on a date still undetermined.
Conservative lawyer Sidney Powell, 68, who was scheduled to stand trial with him in a now-canceled trial that began Monday, pleaded guilty Thursday to six counts of conspiracy to interfere with election duties. She is mainly involved in an intrusion into an election center in Georgia to illegally copy computer data, but her participation in a meeting with Donald Trump and Rudy Guiliani on strategies to influence the outcome of the election was also mentioned.
Insults against a New York court clerk
“The dominoes are starting to fall,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti commented on social networks after the agreement reached by Kenneth Chesebro. “Trump plans to take the blame off the lawyers, but now it will be prosecution witnesses who point the finger at him,” he added. Unlike the sprawling procedure in Georgia, the case investigated at the federal level by Jack Smith targets a single defendant: Donald Trump, who will be tried in this case in Washington from March 4, 2024.
The judicial week ends decidedly badly for the Republican. The ex-president was also fined $5,000 on Friday for an insulting publication against the clerk of the New York court, where he is on civil trial for financial fraud in the management of his real estate empire. . During this trial, magistrate Arthur Engoron had banned, from the second day of the trial on October 3, all parties from attacking his team, after a publication deemed “degrading” for the clerk published on the account of the Republican billionaire on his Truth Social network.
The publication had been removed but “despite this clear order, I learned last night that the incriminating message had never been removed from the DonaldJTrump.com site and that it remained on this site for the last 17 days”, before to be “withdrawn late last night (Thursday), but only in response to an email from this court,” the judge said Friday. “Future violations, intentional or not, will expose the offender to much more severe sanctions”, warns the magistrate, referring to “heavier” fines or even his indictment for contempt of court and “possibly his placement in detention”.