Trump, what do we know about the indictment

Trump

Donald Trump is officially the first former US president to be indicted on criminal charges. The charges are not yet known, but there are talks of at least 30 crimes related to commercial fraud. The prosecution appears to have focused in particular on a $130,000 bribe paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels. With this money, Trump would have bought the woman's silence on their relationship, and then deducted the expense from her tax return, lying about their real destination.

After a 5-year investigation into her personal assets and led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a New York jury voted to indict Donald Trump, who will now face criminal charges and appear at a hearing scheduled for the first week of April as he runs in the presidential election of 2024.

According to CNN , Trump will face about 30 charges , in addition to the one related to the money paid to Stormy Daniels, but they will only be revealed in the next few days . According to statements made by his lawyer, Susan Necheles, the former president intends to turn himself in on Tuesday, April 4 for a preliminary hearing.

Who is Stormy Daniels

As stated on Business Insider , however, the key case of the proceeding seems to concern Stormy Daniels , whose real name is Stephanie Clifford . Stars of the porn industry, both as an actress and as a director, first met Trump in 2006, when the billionaire had recently married Melania Knauss, and they would have had their first sexual relationship four months after the birth of the Trump's youngest son, Barron.

But when in 2016, now years after the break between the two, Trump begins his presidential race and the famous sexist statements emerge about his vision of women and sex, Clifford, a right-wing voter, decides to tell to the newspapers of the relationship with the entrepreneur. To avoid the scandal, Trump's former lawyer Michael Coen enters the field, now sentenced to 3 years in prison for paying the woman illegally and for lying to Congress.

Cohen, in fact, offers $130,000 to Clifford for his silence. Money that the woman accepts, signing a confidentiality agreement. But when Trump wins the election and takes the White House, he gives Cohen back the $130,000 he had advanced, justifying it as the balance of his lawyer's fees, thus making false tax declarations.

The investigations

And it is this black payment, discovered by the investigations of the US authorities, that gets into trouble both Cohen, who initially denies everything but is framed thanks to the tracking of the payments made, and Trump. In this way they are both caught for tax evasion, like the famous Italian-American gangster Al Capone.

It is therefore probable that the former president has been accused of falsifying company documents in the first instance and evasion for having lied about real destination of those 130 thousand dollars. Offenses punishable by up to 4 years in prison which judges can commute to a term of probation .

The candidacy

Currently, Trump continues to deny both that he misrepresented, both to have had sexual relations with Clifford . But the opening of the criminal case will certainly have a strong impact on the current electoral campaign. On the one hand it could stir up the anger of his main supporters, to whom he tells of being the victim of a witch hunt organized by the Democrats, but on the other it could also exhaust the patience of the other Republican voters, tired of yet another scandal.

According to a March 2023 Ipsos poll, about 44% of Republicans said Trump should withdraw his candidacy if he is indicted. Today the former president was formally accused and the trial against him is about to begin. It is therefore a question of waiting for the reactions of the Americans, to understand if his race is destined to end ahead of time or if the blind support of his constituents will lead to new violence as happened on January 6, 2021.