APRIL 4, 2023
NEW YORK — In the city that made him famous, under extraordinary courtroom security, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 34 felony counts related to payments to silence an adult film actress during his 2016 presidential campaign. He is the first former or sitting U.S. president to be criminally charged.
The charges — falsifying business records in the first degree — were announced at an arraignment hearing Tuesday afternoon. The indictment has not yet been released, so the precise details of the charges have not been made public, but that should happen later Tuesday.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was investigating reimbursement payments Trump made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, who in 2016 paid $130,000 to actress Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, to prevent her from disclosing an alleged sexual encounter years earlier with then-candidate Trump.
Trump denies the sexual encounter, which Daniels said occurred years before the campaign.
The prosecution of a former president sets up an extraordinary test for the judicial system amid a viciously partisan political environment: Trump, who is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and leading in most polls, already has verbally attacked Justice Juan Merchan of the New York Supreme Court and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, calling the case a politically motivated “witch hunt” and warning that his supporters could resort to violence in retaliation.
Trump, 76, who gained celebrity as a New York-based real estate and reality television mogul before launching his 2016 campaign, has denied any wrongdoing. Aides have said Trump will make remarks to the media Tuesday evening at his Mar-a-Lago home and private club in south Florida, where he has spent most of his post-presidency.
Trump’s arrival at the courthouse in Lower Manhattan was marked by layers of extra security, with the former president’s Secret Service detail guiding him on a carefully choreographed route from his penthouse in Trump Tower to the courtroom while hundreds of uniformed New York City police officers lined the streets.
Protesters and supporters clogged the area, along with a phalanx of reporters and television news cameras. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) rallied Trump supporters in a park across the street from the courthouse. Many routine court appearances were adjourned in order to limit the number of people in the building ahead of Trump’s appearance.
In addition to the New York case, Trump is facing three other criminal investigations, including Justice Department probes into his handling of classified documents after he left office in 2021 and his potential involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by Trump’s supporters at the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the election results. Local prosecutors in Georgia also are examining Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to pressure state officials to falsely declare him the winner there in the 2020 presidential election over Joe Biden.
Despite Trump’s unprecedented legal jeopardy, however, being charged with — or found guilty of — a crime does not disqualify him from running for office. The former president has sought to use the onslaught of media attention around the New York indictment to shore up political support among his party’s elected leadership and conservative base, as well as bolster fundraising.
Hours before the arraignment, Trump’s campaign sent an fundraising email to supporters in which Trump warns that the United States is turning into a “Marxist Third World country that…IMPRISONS its political opposition” and asks for more donations as “I will be out of commission for the next few hours.”
Merchan has banned cell phones or other communication devices from the courtroom.
Trump has tried to paint Bragg, a Democrat who became Manhattan’s top prosecutor in January 2022, as a partisan who is targeting him for political reasons. He has accused Merchan — who oversaw another trial in which the Trump Organization was convicted and fined $1.6 million for running a tax-fraud scheme — of personal animus, a charge that one of Trump’s own lawyers denied on Sunday.
Bragg and his investigative team spent months probing whether Trump falsified business records connected to the Daniels payments in a way that could constitute a campaign-finance violation — a set of facts and allegations that some lawyers called a “zombie” case because it has lingered, seemingly lifeless but not actually dead, for years.
Legal experts have said that the apparent prosecution theory of the case is an untested application of state law, but that it isn’t necessarily fatal to the case. Trump’s legal team is expected to try to have the case tossed before it ever gets to trial — arguing that, among other things, there was no crime committed because even the alleged conduct by Trump does not fit the meaning or application of the law.
The former president flew from Florida to New York on his TRUMP-emblazoned private jet Monday, spent the night in his penthouse at Trump Tower, then turned himself in at the courthouse on Tuesday.
This is a developing story.
Courtesy/Source: Washington Post
