Former US President Donald Trump appears in a New York court on Tuesday, after being formally charged in a case involving the bribery of a pornographic actress, in an unprecedented event in the country’s history.
Donald Trump, who is also a candidate for the White House in 2024, arrived in New York on Monday after spending the night at Trump Tower in Manhattan, surrounded by strong security.
The session is scheduled for 2:15 p.m. (7:15 p.m. in Lisbon) at the Manhattan criminal court, where Trump must submit to a protocol, which includes taking fingerprints and a photograph, and where he will plead “not guilty,” he said. the defense.
Trump is expected to appear before Judge Juan Merchan, the same magistrate who presided over a criminal trial last year in which the tycoon’s real estate company was convicted of tax fraud but in which Trump was not charged.
At the end of the session, Trump is expected to return to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida mansion, where he will make statements about the entire process, the office of the former US head of state reported.
This, the first criminal charge against a former president in US history, has posed significant security challenges, and authorities are bracing for possible demonstrations.
The accusations against the former president are not yet known, but some of the most faithful allies have already come out in defense of the Republican, such as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most radical names in the Republican Party.
Taylor Greene announced that she will be in New York today, at a protest at Manhattan criminal court, which will also be joined by members of the ‘New York Young Republican Club’.
For the past several weeks, anticipating the impeachment, Donald Trump has been urging his supporters to protest, but there have been few public demonstrations of support across the country.
Questions then arose about whether Trump, the leading Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential race who retains a devoted following, still has the same mobilizing power he had in the attack on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.
However, the New York authorities keep all possibilities open and mounted a mega security operation, in which the 35,000 members of the New York Police Department (NYPD) participated, in addition to agents of the secret services, in charge of the security of the previous president.
The safety of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, responsible for leading this investigation against Trump, has also been a priority for the New York authorities, since he has received at least one death threat.
This whole issue dates back to 2016, when the pornographic actress and director Stormy Daniels contacted various media to sell the news that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, at that time already married to former first lady Melania. Trump.
Trump’s team found out about the offer and lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 (about 120,000 euros) to give up making the case public.
However, when Trump reimbursed Cohen, that payment was recorded as “attorneys’ fees,” and prosecutors argued that this amounted to falsifying business records, which in New York is a crime.
Source: TSF
