Trump charged with falsifying business records

On April 4, the New York Supreme Court filed a first-degree formal indictment of falsifying business records against former president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump. The case concerns the forgery of financial documents of the Trump Organization in the payment of money “for silence” to former pornographic actress Stormy Daniels in 2016. Trump in court said that he was innocent of all 34 counts, Reuters reported.

The accusation includes conspiracy, which makes it much more serious. The judge has already spoken out in favor of the inadmissibility of using Trump’s social networks to incite hatred both against the participants in the process and their relatives (in the morning, Trump mentioned the daughter of the judge in the context of the fact that she worked for US Vice President Kamalla Harris).

Before being charged, Trump was arrested, the first such procedure with an ex-head of state was carried out in the history of the country since 1872, when former President Ulysses Grant was arrested for a minor offense. They did not put handcuffs on the former president, but they took fingerprints. According to standard procedure, Trump was to be arrested before being charged, in which position he was held for more than an hour. After the presentation of charges, he was released from the courtroom until the next hearing.

Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Mercan wrote in an order Monday night that the media’s request to broadcast the prosecution was understandable, but denied it at the request of the ex-president’s lawyers. Journalists were only allowed to take photos in the courtroom. The court’s glass doors, usually transparent, were blacked out on April 4 for security reasons.

Before the court, both supporters and opponents of the ex-president gathered in anticipation of the filing of charges. The White House said it was prepared for possible riots. The incumbent, Trump’s 2020 rival Joe Biden, has read the news about the accusation, according to presidential administration spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre, but it’s “not what he’s focusing on today.”

“Look, the president, like every day, will focus on the American people. He’s going to focus on things like making sure we keep cutting prices for Americans,” Jean-Pierre said. Biden on the afternoon of April 4 participated in a meeting of the Council on Science and Technology.

Trump’s speech on the accusations was previewed by public television C-SPAN, which broadcasts materials from the US federal government, at 8:15 pm ET (about 2:15 pm GMT on April 5). The ex-president will speak at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, where he went after the formal indictment.

A grand jury in New York voted to indict Trump on March 30, but their composition was not announced at the time. According to prosecutors, Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen gave the money to Daniels to “buy silence” about the actress’s alleged connection to Trump in 2006. In 2018, the investigation drew attention to the fact that the payment was indicated in documents as legal fees. at the expense of the Trump Organization, which can be regarded as a deliberate forgery of financial records. In total, about 30 episodes of business fraud appear in the case.

There are two options for the further development of events and their political consequences: in the first, the prosecution will fail and the process will fall apart, which will give Trump an unprecedented trump card for participation in the elections, says Yuri Rogulev, director of the Franklin Roosevelt Foundation for the Study of the United States. This trump card is the unfair persecution for “political reasons”, which will be the actual indictment of the Democrats and Biden, despite their demonstrative detachment from the process. But if it is possible to convincingly prove Trump’s guilt and create a threat of his going to jail, this could lead to a hitherto unprecedented internal political crisis, the Americanist believes.