With hunched shoulders but his chin up, he stepped into a courtroom on the 15th floor of the grimy, hot, and poorly lit New York County criminal court in downtown Manhattan....CONTINUE READING
It is the location of the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president.
Trump walked into the courtroom behind Todd Blanche, his lead lawyer in the case.
He paused for a split second, licked his lips, then began walking up to the courtroom’s center aisle toward his seat at the front of the courtroom.
Moments after he sat down, photographers took his picture sitting at the defense table, where he was flanked by his attorneys. Monday marks the beginning of jury selection, presided over by trial judge Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, which is expected to last up to two weeks.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has accused Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records, saying he lied on documents to disguise payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress.
The aim of those payments — according to prosecutors, Daniels, and others involved in the plan — was to deceive the voting public by making her stay silent about an affair she says she had with him ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
In the hallway before walking into the courtroom, Trump criticized the case, telling journalists it was a “political persecution.”
“This is an assault on America,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened before, there’s never been anything like it.”
“I’m very proud to be here,” he added later.
The hush-money case is the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial before the 2024 election, where Trump is the presumed Republican nominee against President Joe Biden.
Merchan has previously denied about a dozen different attempts from Trump’s lawyers to delay the case. In a Friday decision, Merchan dismissed one of his motions to delay the case because of “pretrial publicity,” calling it “untenable.”
“Defendant appears to take the position that his situation and this case are unique and that the pre-trial publicity will never subside,” Merchan wrote. “However, this view does not align with reality.”
Trump has also fought against Merchan’s gag order, which forbids him from talking about trial jurors, witnesses, staff prosecutors, and family members of Merchan and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.
Over the past year, Trump has been a defendant in three different civil trials.
Two were for cases brought by E. Jean Carroll, where one jury concluded he sexually abused and defamed her, and another found he should pay her more than $80 million in additional damages for continued defamation.
Jury selection was much swifter in those cases, which was held in federal court. For Carroll’s second trial, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan selected the nine-person jury in less than three hours.
The other civil trial was for a sprawling lawsuit from the New York attorney general’s office against the Trump Organization. In that case, a judge — in a bench trial with no jury — ordered him and his codefendants to pay nearly half-a-billion dollars in penalties.
Trump has been charged in three other criminal cases, none of which have firm trial dates yet. Two were brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, over his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and for him hoarding government documents in Mar-a-Lago after the presidency.
The other was brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, for pressuring Georgia election officials to overturn Biden’s 2020 electoral victory in the state.
