With the presence of former President Donald Trump, the selection of the jury in the criminal trial against the former president for secret payments to an actress for adults in exchange for their silence.
The first day of monday ended without any member selected from the 12 required by the court to form the group of New Yorkers who have no impediments or conflicts to issue an objective verdict on the case, related to misuse of campaign funds in 2016.
Trump is the presumptive Republican candidate for next November's presidential elections.
The lawyers and prosecutors continue this Tuesday with the interrogations of those summoned to form the jury, many of them have been eliminated when they recognize affiliation or rejection of the actions of the defendant, or who have followed the detailed information of the media case and have formed a conclusion that would lead them to not be fair.
Arriving at the court this morning, Trump greeted reporters and stopped briefly in front of one of the television cameras installed in the hallway, to which he said that the judge is biased against him.
“This is a trial that should never have been started,” he said. After entering, reporters saw him wink at one of the court officials and say, “How are you?” as he walked toward the courtroom, where he then took a seat at the table with his attorneys.
Unusual cases in the middle of an electoral cycle
This is the first of the four cases with criminal charges faced by former President Trump, the first former president in US history to be accused of criminal charges – state and federal -, the remaining three related to his alleged intervention in the last elections in 2020 and the mishandling of confidential documents.
Donald Trump presents himself as a victim of political persecution with a judicial system that, according to him, favors his main rival, the current Democratic president Joe Biden. also seeking re-election. This trial is a test for the penal system in a polarized country.
The former president has not spared his attacks on the prosecutors and the judge in the case. The Biden White House, on the other hand, has distanced itself from the processes, arguing that the Department of Justice is an independent entity.
The former Republican president, 77, has pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges and falsifying business records to avoid public ridicule of obscene stories about his sex life, which he claims are false, and which his team silenced during the 2016 election campaign.
The charges center on $130,000 in payments that Trump's company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. She paid that sum on Trump's behalf to prevent porn actress Stormy Daniels from going public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied that the sexual encounter ever occurred.
Prosecutors say the payments to Cohen were falsely recorded as legal fees. Prosecutors have described it as part of a plan to bury damaging stories that Trump feared could help his opponent in the 2016 race, particularly because Trump's reputation was suffering at the time over comments he had made about the women.
[Con información de Associated Press y Reuters]
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