Until four months ago, no former US president had sat in the dock in two and a half centuries of the country’s history. Since April, Donald Trump has broken that honorable record, having been indicted four times -once a month-, all of them in cases related to his presidency and ranging from accounting falsification to violation of the espionage law. The trials that he will face next year are complemented by a civil offensive that has already convicted him of sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E. Jean Carroll, and threatens to become an important factor in next year’s electoral campaign. . These are the four causes, in chronological order:
The ‘Stormy Daniels’ case
Trump’s first indictment will come to trial, as scheduled today, on March 25, 2024 in Manhattan, New York. It will examine the stormy daniels case, the oldest of the four and the only one that goes back to the 2016 electoral campaign, in which against all initial odds the tycoon achieved the White House. In those months, the Republican candidate ordered his lawyer and right-hand man, Michael Cohen, to pay the porn actress $130,000. The disbursement was camouflaged as legal expenses. But prosecutor Alvin Bragg believes that there was an accounting falsification and that it was done with the intention of committing or concealing another crime, such as the possible violation of electoral financing laws.
In late March, a grand jury gave Bragg the green light to indict the former president on 34 counts. The hearing for the presentation of charges came a week later, already in April. In the Manhattan courthouse, surrounded by a mass of journalists, the current Republican candidate for the White House made -through the mouth of his lawyer- the same statement that he has repeated in each of his cases: “not guilty ”.
The Mar-a-Lago papers
The second case is, for now, the one scheduled for later. Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by Trump during his term, will preside over the case regarding the Mar-a-Lago papers: the illegal possession of classified materials related to his presidency that the former president kept in his possession starting May 20 , at his private residence in Florida, after leaving the White House in January 2021, after Joe Biden defeated him in the 2020 presidential elections. An FBI search in August 2022 found 48 boxes of material, including a hundred of restricted access documents. About thirty referred to top-secret contingency plans to attack a foreign country (Iran).
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Special prosecutor Jack Smith, appointed by the Department of Justice to take charge of this case and the one related to the attempts to annul the 2020 elections, accuses Trump of forty crimes of illegal possession of classified documentation – some boxes appeared stacked in a bathroom – and violation of the espionage law, which include the tycoon’s attempt to delete images from the cameras that monitored the mansion after receiving a court order for their delivery.
Attempt to reverse election results
The third case is the most serious and concerns the events carried out by Trump, his advisers and supporters in the period between the electoral defeat of the Republican in the presidential elections of November 2020 -in which the Democrat Biden prevailed- and the 6 of January 2021, when a mob of supporters of the president stormed Congress to prevent lawmakers from certifying the current president’s victory. Prosecutor Smith has charged him with four counts: witness tampering, obstruction of legal proceedings, and conspiracy to defraud the US government and to violate civil rights. In his statement of charges, Smith also alludes, without mentioning them by name or filing charges against them, to six Trump collaborators involved in the plot.
“(The imputation) is not only the most serious accusation, by far, against the former president. It is perhaps the most important accusation ever filed in an American court against someone to protect American democracy and the rule of law, ”wrote Professor Richard Hansen, from the University of California-Los Angeles, in the digital slate.
Prosecutors believe that Trump’s claims to have won the election were “false, and the defendant knew they were false. But defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway to make his knowingly false claims about him appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in election administration.”
Trump’s appearance in a federal court in Washington – a city he hates and reciprocates in sentiment – was the first in which the former president himself pronounced his “not guilty” out loud. A trial date has not yet been set. Smith aspires to a quick process that begins on January 2, but the former president’s legal team is in no hurry: the argument that he is a victim of the powers that be generates abundant electoral gains for Trump. “There is no need to rush a defendant in the United States. And we hope that the Department of Justice recognizes that fairness is more important than speed,” Trump’s attorney John Lauro told NPR.
Attempt to alter the election result in the state of Georgia
The fourth charge bears similarities to the third in that it also relates to attempts to tamper with the election results. But this case, unlike its precedent, is not federal, but state, and only concerns what happened in the state of Georgia.
Prosecutor Fani Willis, in charge of the investigation, could charge about a dozen people along with Trump for pressure on state election officials to change the sum of the votes, which gave Biden the victory by less than 12,000 ballots. . The lawyer has also examined the case of irregular entry into the computer systems of electronic voting machines in a rural county and an attempt to use false voters to pronounce themselves in favor of the president.
One of the most damaging evidence for Trump, at least a priori, is a recording, published by the newspaper The Washington Post, in which he is heard pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to out-count his rival. The former president assures that in that conversation he simply limited himself to expressing his discontent.
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