Absence of “foundations”, according to Bragg
“This court should reject the defense’s appeal to ‘immediately’ overturn the indictment and guilty verdict decided by the jury, based solely on the result of the last presidential election,” argued the Manhattan prosecutor. , Alvin Bragg. “There is currently no basis for such a cancellation before the inauguration of the accused (January 20), because the immunity of a president-elect does not exist,” defends the magistrate in an argument addressed to the judge of the Manhattan criminal court, Juan Merchan, who must decide.
“And even after the inauguration, his temporary immunity as president in office would not justify radically rejecting a guilty verdict voted unanimously by the jurors and erasing with a stroke of the pen all the completed stages of this criminal procedure,” explains the prosecutor.
“Arrangements” proposed by Bragg to Trump
Donald Trump’s lawyers invoked last week the presidential pardon granted by Joe Biden to his son Hunter to demand that Judge Merchan “immediately quash the indictment and the jury’s verdict.”
The next president was found criminally guilty in May of concealed payments of $130,000, before the 2016 presidential election, to a pornographic film actress, Stormy Daniels, so that she would keep quiet about a sexual encounter ten years earlier. A relationship that Donald Trump has always denied. Describing the case as “bogus”, the Republican leader accused the Justice of New York, a Democratic state, of being exploited by his political adversaries.
The pronouncement of his sentence has been postponed many times and remains in abeyance, the defense using all possible recourses. Prosecutor Bragg therefore proposes to the judge “arrangements” so that the criminal proceedings do not “weigh” on the second Trump presidency: that the convicted person does not see himself imposed a “sentence of incarceration” or that “the proceedings are suspended during the mandate” of four years.
Letitia James refuses to drop financial fraud charges
Convicted once criminally and three times civilly in New York, Donald Trump saw his judicial horizon at the federal level completely cleared by the abandonment of at least two criminal proceedings, thanks to a ruling by the Supreme Court which expanded the scope of presidential immunity on July 1 and for his re-election on November 5.
In civil court, he was sentenced in February by the Manhattan courts to $454 million in fines, with his sons Eric and Donald Jr., for financial fraud within their real estate empire Trump Organization.
But their lawyer John Sauer, who will soon be number 4 at the Department of Justice, demanded in writing at the end of November that the Attorney General of the State of New York, Letitia James, “completely abandon the case against President Donald J . Trump, his family, his businesses and vacates the judgment and all damages.
By letter posted Tuesday on social networks, Letitia James responded: “Your letter does not offer any legal basis for (my) services to seek to overturn the final judgment and drop this case.”
Related News :