Donald Trump
Selecting 12 impartial citizens to judge Donald Trump: this long and delicate process entered into hard Tuesday at the historic trial of the former American president.
At midday, 12 jurors, the required number, were pre-selected after answering a long questionnaire which revealed whole sections of their lives in court: their profession, their family situation, their sources of information , their centers of interest.
But they are not finished: in turn, the prosecution and the defense will have plenty of time to examine them in detail, to detect any suspicion of partiality towards Donald Trump, the first former American president to appear in criminal proceedings.
“I would say that I am a Democrat, but when I am here, for me (Donald Trump) is a defendant and he is nothing other than that,” declared a potential juror, under the eyes of the Republican billionaire.
Another confided that he had already read books by Donald Trump, such as the famous “The Art of The Deal”, but that nothing would prevent him from being a “fair and impartial” juror.
Another, a former lawyer, made the audience laugh by admitting that he had been “a big fan”, during his college years, of “The Apprentice”, the famous reality TV show in which Donald Trump launched to “you’re fired” candidates.
Biden a campaign
The prosecution and defense have the power to challenge a certain number of candidates without having to provide justification. On Monday, of a first group of 96 admitted to the courtroom, two thirds were immediately exempted, the majority because they declared themselves incapable of being impartial.
In the middle of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump, 77, must watch, in silence, this long and tedious process, at a time when his rival Joe Biden is campaigning on the ground in his hometown of Scranton, in the state of Pennsylvania ( northeast), crucial for the November election.
“It’s a trial that should never have existed,” said the former Republican president, once again calling Judge Juan Merchan an “anti-Trump judge” who ordered him to be present at the hearings on Monday. or four days a week.
“I should be right now in Pennsylvania and Florida, in many other states, in North Carolina, in Georgia, campaigning,” added Donald Trump, before sitting down in his chair. warned.
“All this comes from the White House,” said the man who describes his legal affairs as “political persecution”.
Donald Trump is being prosecuted for payments intended to buy the silence of former porn star Stormy Daniels, a few days before the 2016 election which he won narrowly against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
More than three years after leaving the White House in chaos, he theoretically faces a prison sentence. This would not prevent him from being a candidate in the presidential election on November 5, where he dreams of revenge on Joe Biden, but would project the campaign into the unknown.
Fake accountants
If he is found not guilty, it would be a major success for the Republican candidate.
Especially since he managed through appeals to postpone his three other criminal trials, two for illicit attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, and one for supposedly casual handling of classified documents.
Donald Trump is charged with falsifying accounting documents from his company, the Trump Organization, which allegedly aimed to hide, under the cover of “legal fees”, the payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels by his personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen.
In exchange, the latter had agreed to keep quiet about a sexual relationship with the billionaire in 2006. Donald Trump has always denied this relationship and his defense ensures that the payments were in the private sphere.
But prosecutor Alvin Bragg intends to demonstrate that these are indeed fraudulent maneuvers to hide information from voters a few days before the vote.
“No one can seriously dispute that the reason he (Michael Cohen, Editor’s note) and Trump came up with this ploy was to deprive voters of information that could have changed the outcome of an extremely close election,” he said. explained legal analyst Norman Eisen for CNN.
SOURCE: AFP
