Court, meetings, court: Donald Trump returns Thursday to sit in a courtroom in New York, where his trial with extraordinary stakes for hidden payments to a former porn actress awaits for several more weeks.
The weekly break in hearings this Wednesday offered a boost to the campaign for the Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, who was able to overwhelm his rival Joe Biden during two meetings in the key states of Wisconsin and Michigan.
But the return to the trial box on Thursday promises to be perilous. Before the resumption of the debates, judge Juan Merchan examines from 9:30 a.m. (1:30 p.m. GMT) a new burst of unbridled declarations from the tempestuous Republican billionaire, which prosecutors denounce as violations of the ban, set by the magistrate, on attack jurors or witnesses.
If Donald Trump, 77, remains silent for hours during the hearings, the question of his interventions outside the court or on social networks has become increasingly burning.
On Tuesday, the judge sentenced him for contempt of the maximum fine, or $9,000, for nine publications in which he attacked the prosecution’s key witness, his former lawyer turned sworn enemy Michael Cohen, or the jurors, including he implies that they would lack impartiality towards him.
Above all, the magistrate threatened the former President of the United States with outright incarceration in the event of a repeat offense, the law providing for up to 30 days in prison.
The invectives examined Thursday were pointed out by prosecutors before this threat. Among them, an interview where Donald Trump describes the jurors as “95% Democrats”. The judge is not obliged to rule immediately.
– Behind the scenes of the campaign –
Three years after leaving the White House in chaos, and having recovered from two impeachment proceedings, Donald Trump enters the campaign being indicted in four different cases, including that before the federal courts in Washington for his alleged illegal attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election won by Joe Biden in 2020.
But due to appeals and procedural questions, the current trial in New York, of a smaller scale, could be the only one tried before the November 5 election.
Donald Trump nevertheless risks the first criminal conviction of a former American president and in theory a prison sentence, a scenario which would tip the campaign into the unknown.
The former President of the United States is being prosecuted for 34 falsifications of accounting documents which allegedly served to conceal a payment to cover up a potential sex scandal in the home stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, won narrowly against Hillary Clinton.
A sum of $130,000 was paid to former porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, to buy her silence about a sexual relationship she claimed to have had with him in 2006, when he was already married. A relationship that Donald Trump denies.
Since the start of the trial, witnesses have revealed behind the scenes of the victorious 2016 campaign, where colorful intermediaries, such as the former boss of an American tabloid, negotiated the exclusivity of sensational stories likely to splash Donald Trump, ultimately not publishing them and protecting him from any scandal.
But the most anticipated actors, like the former damned soul of Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, who had paid Stormy Daniels directly, have not yet testified before the jurors.
The trial, which is in its third week, is expected to last between six and eight.
