SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP
Former US President Donald Trump at a rally for the 2024 election campaign in Waco, Texas on March 25, 2023.
UNITED STATES – While the press was buzzing with rumors of a possible indictment, Donald Trump had pulled off a coup on the morning of March 18 by claiming without the slightest evidence on his Truth Social social network that he would be ” stopped “ and would appear in a New York court on March 21 to be charged.
Yet Donald Trump is still free. And America is suspended again this week from this hypothetical indictment, which would be unprecedented against a former American president.
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Back to Fox News
But a new twist came this Monday, March 27, after the broadcast of an interview on the conservatives’ favorite channel, Fox News, recorded from his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida where Donald Trump called the investigation by prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s” scam “.
“I don’t know if it’s good or bad (for his candidacy in 2024). In my opinion, this is a way of cheating in the elections. It’s election interference.”accused the Republican billionaire who has been claiming without foundation for almost two and a half years that the November 2020 presidential election was “volley” by Democratic President Joe Biden.
“We are dealing with dishonest people and thugs, and people, I believe, who hate our country”, denounced the businessman in this first interview in ages on Fox News, television of the media empire New Corp. of Rupert Murdoch, with whom relations deteriorated after his electoral defeat in 2020.
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For several years, New York justice has sought to determine whether Donald Trump was guilty of misrepresentation, a minor offense, or breach of campaign finance laws, a criminal offense, by having paid money to Pornographic actress Stormy Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, just before her presidential victory in November 2016.
What purpose ? For her to conceal a supposed extramarital relationship ten years earlier, according to the prosecution.
A case “can”
Accused by the former president and Republican parliamentarians of having a “political motivation”Prosecutor Bragg, an elected Democrat at the head of the Manhattan prosecution since 2022, replied last Thursday by mail that the businessman had “created a false expectation” media on his indictment and denounced a “interference” in the investigation.
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At a campaign rally on Saturday in Texas, Donald Trump, pointed out by the Washington Post and the New York Times to sometimes flirt with inciting violence from his supporters, had denied “any offence” and any affair with Stormy Daniels. On Fox News Monday evening, the 45th president of the United States did not change his speech.
Saturday evening, on the plane returning from Texas, he had even affirmed that the affair was “phony, the kind of bogus business they have absolutely nothing on”.
“I think they have already dropped the case”, he told the political media Axios. And the 45th President of the United States to drive home the point Sunday on Truth Social: “The Manhattan District Attorney’s witch hunt against me is DEAD”.
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On Monday, according to the court press in New York, a grand jury (panel of citizens with broad investigative powers who work together with prosecutors to possibly vote on criminal charges) reconvened in Manhattan court to hear a witness in the Stormy Daniels case.
If this grand jury, whose confidential hearings are held on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, votes for an indictment, the prosecutor Bragg will have to comply with it and make it public. In the days that follow, former President Trump will then have to ” surrender “ before the Manhattan court to be served by a judge with his indictment, to be briefly placed ” under arrest “photographed and his fingerprints taken.
He will then have to plead guilty or not guilty. In principle, the next grand jury meeting will take place on Wednesday. And Donald Trump is likely to closely scrutinize a possible media intervention by Prosecutor Bragg.
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