Will Donald Trump be tried before the November presidential election? Doubt is growing as New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg, on Thursday March 14, to everyone’s surprise, asked the judge to postpone for up to thirty days the criminal trial which was to begin in Manhattan on March 25. Mr. Bragg is trying to convict the former president of having paid, illegally according to him, 130,000 dollars (119,000 euros) to porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016, in the middle of the presidential campaign, in order to buy her silence about an alleged sexual relationship. But the prosecutor has received thousands of pages of new federal documents and wants to give Donald Trump’s lawyers time to review them.
This rebound increases the uncertainties over a trial which has always been deemed legally risky, for old and secondary facts compared to the real issue, the indictment of Donald Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 elections and the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021.
On this point, the situation is also blocked: a federal trial in Washington is suspended by the decision of the Supreme Court which must examine in April whether he enjoys possible immunity, while in Georgia the prosecutor Fani Willis, who is pursuing him with 14 alleged accomplices for the same facts, has been weakened since it was learned that she had maintained a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a lawyer from a private firm recruited to investigate the case. In two years, the latter’s office received $650,000 from the public prosecutor’s office, while the couple made numerous costly escapades to California and the Caribbean. Donald Trump’s lawyers requested the recusal of Ms. Willis, believing that the couple had an interest in suing the former president to make money. Friday, March 14, an Atlanta judge made the withdrawal of Mr. Wade a condition for the prosecutor to remain in this trial.
The next step is the payment of a bail of 450 million dollars by the end of the month, in the wake of the conviction of the ex-president for having overvalued his real estate empire and thus obtained more favorable financial conditions of its bankers. But this sanction obtained in February by New York prosecutor Letitia James has the air of a Pyrrhic victory, as the penalty is considered exorbitant by observers.
Thus, the former president seems poised to triumph politically in his trials, denouncing a witch hunt, and has succeeded in transforming his appearances before the courts into a racial and partisan affair. Indeed, the three prosecutors who are prosecuting him are all African-Americans affiliated with the Democratic Party, whom Donald Trump continues to accuse of racism against him, in a politicized judicial system.
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