Donald Trump, who on Monday became the first former American president to appear before the criminal justice system, described his trial in New York as an “attack on America”, which makes his duel against Joe Biden during the election even more unpredictable. of November.
Shortly before the start of the hearing at the Manhattan court, the Republican candidate once again denounced a “political persecution” plotted by the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden. He then entered the courtroom.
Risk of a prison sentence
Donald Trump is on trial for a case of payments intended to buy the silence of former porn star Stormy Daniels, a few days before the 2016 election which made him the 45th president of the United States.
A little more than three years after leaving the White House in chaos, he faces, in theory, a prison sentence. This would not prevent him from being a candidate in the presidential election on November 5, where he dreams of a revenge against Joe Biden, but would place the campaign in a completely new situation. If he were found not guilty, it would on the contrary be a major victory for the Republican candidate.
A fragile file
“The stakes are very high, because Trump and his lawyers have succeeded so far in slowing down (other) trials” on charges of illegal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his handling of classified documents, underlines Carl Tobias, professor of law at the University of Richmond.
And the Stormy Daniels case, described as fragile by experts, “could be the only one judged before the elections,” he adds. Until the last days, lawyers vainly multiplied appeals to delay the deadline. Saturday evening, at a meeting in Pennsylvania (north-east), he assured that he would testify at the trial.
The 2016 presidential election in the sights?
The billionaire is indicted for 34 falsifications of accounting documents from his company, the Trump Organization, which allegedly aimed to hide, under the cover of “legal fees”, payments made in the very final stretch of the 2016 presidential election to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels.
For $130,000, the latter had agreed to keep quiet about a sexual relationship with the Republican billionaire ten years earlier, when he was already married to Melania Trump. Donald Trump has always denied this relationship and his defense intends to demonstrate that the payments were in the private sphere. But the prosecution, led by the prosecutor elected under the Democratic label Alvin Bragg, wants to demonstrate that there were indeed fraudulent maneuvers to hide information from voters a few days before the presidential election, narrowly won by the Republican against Hillary. Clinton.