Donald Trump turned his first public intervention into a reckless diatribe after being charged with 34 counts of forgery for concealing the $130,000 bribe that he gave to the porn actress Stormy Daniels in payment for his silence about the extramarital relationship that, according to her, both maintained in the 2006.
“The criminal is district attorney” Alvin Bragg for having “massively leaked” the details of his indictment, said the first former US president to be criminally charged. It was at a brief rally inside his Mar-a-Lago residence; a speech that, in contrast to his usual interventions of two hours or more, barely reached thirty minutes.
The Republican leader also attacked the magistrate who is hearing his case, Juan Merchan, and his family. “He is a judge who hates Trump, like his family, with a wife who hates me and a daughter who works for Kamala Harris,” he said.
The former president had already attacked those who are prosecuting him from the New York district of Manhattan, but this time he did so after being charged and warned about it by the prosecutor and even by one of his lawyers, Joe Tacopina, who distanced himself from some initial insults from “racist” and “animal” to Bragg.
Trump also lashed out last night with the special counsel overseeing inquiries into his role in the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol and the concealment of classified documents at his Florida residence. “We have this lunatic Jack Smith threatening people every day through his representatives,†he snapped.
All the jurists who have been commenting on the legal cases against Trump agree that the Republican risks another indictment for defaming or slandering the prosecutors and judges who are investigating him.
The also candidate for re-election in the 2024 presidential elections had no shame in admitting that he took home hundreds of secret documents that he should have put in the hands of the National Archives institution: a fact and an investigation much more tricky for him than those of the bribery to Daniels.
“We were negotiating in very good faith and appropriately to return some or all of the documents that I openly and in plain sight brought with me to Mar-a-Lago from our beautiful White House, as virtually every other president has done in the past,” Trump confessed. .
The former president insisted that “I would never have thought that something like this – like his imputation – could happen in America.” He added that it is “a persecution, not an investigation”; of a “false case” in a “lawless country”.
