The date was eagerly awaited, a few months before the American presidential election. Donald Trump will be the first former president of the United States to appear in criminal trial on March 25 in the case of payments to silence an alleged relationship with a porn actress.
“We want delays,” declared the Republican favorite for the November presidential election upon his arrival in front of the Manhattan courthouse on Thursday, February 15. “How can you run for office when you are sitting in a court of law? ". “It’s just a way of harming me in the election,” denounced the ex-president, who regularly accuses the judges of being under the thumb of the Democratic camp.
Judge Juan Merchan of the New York court rejected Donald Trump's requests to dismiss the lawsuits, as the Republican tycoon wanted.
The former Republican president is caught up in a scandal that he had visibly tried to cover up before it exploded, when he was running for the White House in 2016: he is accused of accounting fraud after having paid, through from the Trump Organization, to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels the sum of 130,000 dollars so that she would not make public a past relationship. The relationship dates back to 2006. Donald Trump was then already married to Melania Trump, who had just given birth to their last son, Barron Trump.
Other ongoing legal cases
At the same time, a Georgia judge began hearing Thursday a motion from Donald Trump's lawyers seeking to dismiss election interference charges against the former president, accusing the prosecutor in charge of investigating the case of having maintained a romantic relationship with a lawyer she had hired to work on this case.
The ex-president is in fact being prosecuted before the federal courts and that of the State of Georgia for his allegedly illicit attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden. The federal trial in Washington was scheduled to start on March 4 but was postponed while it ruled on possible criminal immunity for the former president.
For the moment, these cases and the many others targeting Donald Trump have not damaged his credibility with the base of Republican activists and he handily won his party's first two primaries for the presidential nomination of November, in the states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
At 77, the master of the Republicans has even turned the courts into political forums. The Republican favorite took advantage of each of his appearances in the courtrooms to portray himself, without evidence, as a victim of legal machinations orchestrated by prosecutors and judges in the pay of the Democratic camp. And his legal troubles allowed him to raise millions of dollars from activists.
This new legal week for Donald Trump could continue on Friday, if, as a source close to the case confirmed to Agence France-Presse, judge Arthur Engoron renders his judgment in a civil trial where the ex-president is accused of having colossally inflated the value of its real estate assets in the 2010s to seduce the banks.
