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NEW YORK. — Donald Trump, the former US president and front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, was formally charged yesterday in a watershed moment ahead of the 2024 presidential election as his supporters and detractors noisily rallied outside the Manhattan courthouse where he will appear.
Trump, 76, is the first sitting or former president to face criminal charges. He was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury last week in a case stemming from a 2016 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, though the specific charges have yet to be disclosed. Trump has said he is innocent and is due to plead not guilty.
“Today (Tuesday) is the day that a ruling political party ARRESTS its leading opponent for having committed NO CRIME,” Trump, who flew to New York from his Florida home on Monday, said in a fundraising email sent out yesterday morning.
On a cool and sunny early spring day in the most-populous U.S. city, Trump supporters and detractors were separated by barricades set up by police to try to keep order, though there were some confrontations.
Hundreds of Trump supporters, at a park across from the Manhattan courthouse, cheered and blew whistles. His critics held signs including one of Trump dressed in a striped jail uniform behind bars and another that read, “Lock Him Up.”
While yesterday’s arraignment of was the first time a former US president has been charged with criminal offences, it likely won’t be the last. By summer’s end, Trump could be charged in no fewer than four separate criminal investigations.
In fact, while Trump’s indictment stemming from his US$130 000 hush money payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels represents a legal threat to the former president, the others may carry a greater risk of serious consequences, including a possible prison sentence.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will soon decide whether to charge Trump with multiple crimes for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
Willis and her team are going over the possible charges they may file against Trump and his associates with a fine-tooth comb. An indictment could come in the next few weeks and may contain multiple criminal counts.
“Because there is such a tsunami of potential counts that the DA could bring, the proper analytical frame is to ask whether she’ll bring a laser-focus, narrow case or is she going to bring a sweeping, broad case,” said attorney Norm Eisen.
At the centre of both potential prosecutorial approaches to charging Trump is his infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, in which Trump urged him to “find” enough votes to flip his loss in the crucial swing state. Trump has insisted that he did nothing wrong in the “perfect” phone call, but according to Eisen it would be an especially prominent part of the prosecution’s case should Willis pursue a narrowly tailored indictment.
“If she brings more of the laser-focused case, the anchor of that case and the most dangerous to Trump is the solicitation of election fraud because it fits his solicitation of Raffensperger to just find 11 780 votes that did not exist like a hand fits a glove,” Eisen said.
Eisen helped author a November report by the Brookings Institution, where he is a senior fellow, that laid out the possible charges in the Georgia case, including solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties, interference with primaries and elections, and conspiracy to commit election fraud.
Trump and his allies also launched a plot to draw up a slate of false electors in Georgia so as to keep Joe Biden from receiving the state’s Electoral College votes. That effort included meetings held between Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Georgia lawmakers. According to the Brookings Institution report, charges from that campaign could include making false statements, improperly influencing government officials, forgery in the first degree and criminal solicitation.
If Willis decides on a more sweeping indictment, she will likely use Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, Eisen said.
“There she would claim that the Trump campaign essentially became a racketeering enterprise and that acts like soliciting those state votes and soliciting those fake election certificates were the basis for advancing this much larger conspiracy,” he said.
“I’d guess she goes the RICO route,” Eisen speculated. “It’s tougher to prove. It sweeps in more evidence. It’s tougher on the jury because it requires them to sit for longer. There’s challenges that come with the RICO route, but the payoff in terms of commanding the jury’s imagination and securing the most serious penalties is substantial.”
In Georgia, that payoff would further complicate Trump’s ability to conduct a presidential campaign.
“Given the nature, the severity, the sweep and the scope, the Georgia case and the federal ones are the ones where jail time is more likely,” Eisen said. – YahooNews.com
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