The 12 members of the popular jury of the Stormy Daniels case, the first criminal case of the four he faces, have declared former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump guilty in the trial in which he was tried for falsifying accounting records to cover up the payment of a bribe to the actress for electoral purposes. He has been found guilty of the 34 charges against him by the unanimity of the 12 members of the jury required to reach a verdict. “I am a very innocent man,” Trump said as he left the court, challenging citizens to the trial of the polls in the presidential elections on November 5.
Trump becomes the first former US president to be convicted in a criminal trial. The sentence comes just over five months before the presidential elections and represents an earthquake in the American political landscape. Although a good part of Trump’s followers said that they would continue supporting him even if he were found guilty, this is an unprecedented situation and the reaction of the electorate is unpredictable.
Once guilt has been established by the jury, it is now the judge who has to impose the sentence. It is scheduled to be issued on July 11. The media present in the room indicate that Trump has been left without a response, as if petrified in the dock, after hearing the verdict. Upon leaving the court he was combative and defiant in an appearance of just over two minutes before the media in which he did not accept questions.
“This is a shame,” Trump began, calling the judge “corrupt.” “The true verdict will be on November 5 by the people. They know what has happened here and everyone knows what has happened here. “We haven’t done anything wrong. I am a very innocent man. We are fighting for our country. We are fighting for our Constitution. Our country is being manipulated right now. “This was done by the Biden administration,” he continued. “We have been hurt by a political opponent. And I think it’s just a disgrace. And we will continue fighting. Our country has gone to hell. We no longer have the same country. We have a disaster in decline. We are a nation in decline, seriously, with millions and millions of people entering our country at this time from prisons and mental institutions, terrorists, and they are taking over our country,” he said, resorting to xenophobic hoaxes on immigration matters. that he considers to be electorally profitable.
“We have a country that is in big problems. But this has been a huge decision rigged from day one with a conflicted judge, he should never have been allowed to try this case. Never. And we will fight for our Constitution,” he concluded, in what seems to advance his intention to appeal until reaching the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, interpreter of the Constitution.
The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for which he has been convicted are punishable by up to four years in prison each. The absence of a criminal record works in his favor. In each of the decisions, unanimity was required: a single dissenting opinion was enough for the trial to be declared null, although Judge Merchan could invite the members of the jury to redirect the deliberations to try to reach an agreement. Despite the conviction, Trump can continue with his electoral career and even be re-elected in November.
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After receiving instructions from Judge Juan Merchan about the law and the factors that had to be taken into account, deliberations began on Wednesday, May 29. At his request, the jurors reviewed the statements of other witnesses, since, as Merchan stressed, they could not rely solely on the story of the “accomplice” Michael Cohen, the main prosecution witness and on whose testimony the case is based. For this reason, they first requested to review the statement of David Pecker, a friend of Trump and editor of the tabloid The National Enquirera key publication in the concealment of information unfavorable to the Republican’s interests in the 2016 presidential campaign.
During the marathon session of final arguments, on Tuesday the 28th, the prosecution and defense tried to convince the seven men and five women, all of them residents of Manhattan, of Trump’s guilt or innocence, respectively. For more than four hours, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass accused the former president of trying to “deceive” voters in the 2016 presidential election through a criminal plot to bury embarrassing stories that could torpedo his campaign, especially among female voters. The payment of dark money to Daniels was made in October, weeks before the elections, to silence a sexual relationship in 2006 that the Republican denies. “This case, at its core, is about a conspiracy and a cover-up,” Steinglass said in the final round of conclusions.
On the contrary, Trump’s main lawyer, Todd Blanche, relativized the conspiracy argument (“any presidential campaign is,” he said) and called the prosecution’s star witness, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, a “biggest liar.” of all time,” while proclaiming his client’s innocence on all charges and pressuring the jury for an acquittal.
At the trial, evidence was presented that Trump and his allies — Cohen, who has already been tried and convicted of bribery and subsequent illicit campaign financing, and Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer— conspired to silence potentially embarrassing stories during the 2016 presidential campaign by paying bribes to Daniels and the former model Playboy Karen McDougal. The defense lawyer dedicated a good part of his interventions during the trial to refuting the testimonies of Daniels, whom he presented as a profiteer motivated by economic interest, and of Cohen, who advanced him the $130,000 that his silence supposedly cost. of the. When the now president reimbursed him that money in 2017, plus a bonus and the proportional part of the taxes—in total, $420,000—the Trump Organization, the family emporium, recorded it as “legal expenses,” the crux, for prosecutors. , of the 34 crimes.
![Donald Trump, flanked by his lawyers, on May 29 in the courtroom.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/RJ5AH7NULKGZZLJ2KN75MMH64M.jpg?auth=58c0962cf1fc6435ad113cb8b851304c315f0ce7afe47a9813d9336bbf1c8efd&width=414)
Although Trump has repeatedly denied his relationship with Daniels before and during the trial, the prosecutor explained that the woman’s account of their alleged meeting at a Lake Tahoe hotel was full of details “that ring true,” such as the decoration of the suite and what he saw in Trump’s toiletry bag. Steinglass admitted that the woman’s story was “confusing, it makes people uncomfortable hearing it. But that is the key, because it reinforces the interest [de Trump] in buying their silence,” Steinglass said.
Abort another scandal
The payment was made against the noisy backdrop caused by the audio Access Hollywood, a recording from 2005, but released in September 2016 — a month before the Daniels bribe — in which Trump could be heard bragging about sexually grabbing women without their permission because he was famous. According to prosecutors, the newspaper’s publication of that tape Washington Postconvinced Trump of the need to abort the possible revelation of the affair with Daniels, to avoid another scandal facing, above all, the voters.
The statements of prosecutors and lawyers, antagonistic when it came to evaluating the credibility of the witnesses, Trump’s criminal responsibility and the solidity of the evidence, offered the jury the final touches to complete a momentous task, unprecedented in the United States: the to decide the conviction or acquittal of a president and presidential candidate before the November elections. The Manhattan trial, instructed by prosecutor Alvin Bragg, was already historic before it took place: it was the first against a former US president, and the only one of the four criminal proceedings that Trump faces that is resolved before November 5, date of the presidential elections.
The same day that the jury began to deliberate, Trump did not waste the media set—delimited by fences, as a metaphor for the future—that the gloomy hallway on the 15th floor of the New York criminal court offered him, to give free rein to the more strange occurrences. The first, compare herself with Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges. The charges are rigged. Everything is rigged, but we’ll see…”
To his rival for re-election in November, Democrat Joe Biden, whom he accuses of instigating the process, he dedicated unfounded complaints: “All of this [el juicio] he is armed for the Democrats to beat up his political opponent. By Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of the United States. He is destroying our country. He is letting in millions of people from jails, prisons, asylums, mental institutions, drug dealers. Venezuela, if you look at their crime statistics, has dropped 72% because they are releasing all their criminals in our country because of this horrible president we have” (sic, according to the transcript of the accredited journalists in the hallway).
Nor did he spare an electoral forecast: “November 5 is going to be the most important day in the history of our country. We are going to recover our country from these fascists and these thugs who are destroying us with inflation, and everything they do .”
The Republican candidate, who has taken advantage of the free time between sessions of the trial to campaign, leads most of the voting intention surveys.
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