Trump criminal trial | A second week of debates comes to an end

(New York) A second week of debates concludes Friday at Donald Trump’s trial in New York for hidden payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels.

In this case with enormous political stakes, the Republican candidate in the November election against outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden is being prosecuted for 34 falsifications of accounting documents.

Donald Trump again deplored Friday upon his arrival in court that this trial is taking him away from the campaign. He criticized Judge Juan Merchan, whose impartiality he systematically challenges, for “seeking to present the case as as salacious as possible by authorizing testimony that has nothing to do with it.”

The alleged accounting falsifications would have been used to conceal the payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels in the home stretch of the 2016 presidential election, won narrowly against Hillary Clinton.

This sum was used to buy her silence about a fleeting sexual relationship that she claimed to have had with the real estate mogul in 2006, when he was already married to his current wife, Melania. A relationship that Donald Trump denies.

Finally, a confidentiality contract was signed on October 28, 2016, a few days before the vote.

The $130,000 was paid by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, via a shell company. He was reimbursed in 2017 by the billionaire’s holding company, the Trump Organization, for expenses disguised as “legal fees”, hence the prosecution for falsification of accounting documents.

“Extortion”

The ballet of witnesses continues Friday with the hearing of an expert, started Thursday, on the credibility of the data extracted from Michael Cohen’s phones.

The latter, who says he acted at the request of the candidate and turned against his former boss, has not yet testified.

The whole point of the affair will be to determine what Donald Trump knew about these behind-the-scenes negotiations.

In recent days, the defense has worked to undermine the credibility of the lawyer who represented Stormy Daniels in this transaction, Keith Davidson.

The former Republican president’s lawyers painted an unflattering portrait of the witness and his methods.

Keith Davidson made a specialty of monetizing silence on embarrassing secrets from celebrities, practices described as “extortion” by one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, Emil Bove.

Three years after leaving the White House in chaos, Donald Trump enters the campaign being indicted in four cases, including that before the federal courts in Washington for accusations of illegal attempts to reverse the results of the presidential election won by Joe Biden in 2020.

But due to appeals and procedural questions, the trial in New York, of a smaller scale, could be the only one tried before the November 5 election.

If he were elected again, Donald Trump could, once inaugurated in January 2025, order the abandonment of the two federal proceedings against him, in Washington but also in Florida (southeast), where he is being prosecuted for allegedly managing casual access to classified documents after his departure from the White House.