Ex-president Donald Trump attends the first day of his criminal trial, at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on April 15, 2024. | Angela Weiss/AP
NEW YORK—A trial of Donald Trump opens on April 15, for real, on a criminal cover-up. And it’s not a trial the Republican presidential nominee can stall all the way through this fall’s election. Nor is it one he can squash even if, God forbid, he re-enters the White House this January.
That’s because Trump faces a 34-count state felony indictment, in New York State Supreme Court, that alleges the former president falsified business records to hide damaging information in the weeks preceding the 2016 presidential election.
And state charges, unlike federal indictments, can’t be tossed out by Trump toadies in the Justice Department even if the former real estate mogul re-enters the White House in January.
Trump would have done well to heed Richard Nixon, the prior Republican president to face impeachment—but who quit before he lost the Watergate case almost 50 years ago—when he said, “It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up.”
This trial, the first-ever of a president or former president on criminal charges, however, is important for a key reason. It’s the only Trump trial, that, as timelines now stand, begins and will probably end before Election Day. Jury selection, which could take two weeks, starts today, with the trial itself expected to last six to eight weeks.
And a convicted Trump could lose half of Republican voters, the latest opinion poll on the issue, released on Valentine’s Day, shows.
There is no precedent for trying a former president on criminal charges. But the deputy Watergate prosecutors of Nixon wanted to try him criminally, too. That trial, though, was in federal court in D.C., and Republican President Gerald Ford’s controversial pardon ended that trial possibility.
Ford said Nixon had suffered enough without having to go through a trial. After Ford’s pardon Nixon retired to a seaside mansion where he continued his “suffering” in California. After a stint at being America’s dictator Trump too would like to retire to “suffer” at his seaside mansion in Florida. While criminal ex-presidents suffer their punishment at seaside mansions, most of the rest of us do that behind bars.
Others would already be jailed
Anyone else having committed crimes on the level of Nixon and Trump would now be in jail. There is indeed a double standard of justice in America but not one that persecutes the Nixons and the Trumps, as they claim, but one that treats them with kid gloves while it treats the rest of us much more harshly.
With appeals in this hush-money cover-up case, if he’s convicted, Trump could delay sentencing, fines and/or going to jail until well into next year, if not beyond. But unlike the federal cases, he can’t avoid them by dropping prosecution or pardoning himself.
The trial of Trump in Manhattan is not about just the hush money but about covering up that transaction and his intent to influence the outcome of an election with that transition and about his actual violation of campaign finance laws by carrying out that transaction.
Trump covered up a$130,000 hush money payment to stripper Stormy McDaniels. He also paid a $150,000 “kill fee” to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, via the National Enquirer. The cover-up was to hide his prior affairs with the two women from being disclosed during his presidential election campaign eight years ago. Trump characterized them as “legal fees” and thus as business expenses.
The characterization itself is a misdemeanor under New York law, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his assistants, who are trying the case before State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, raised each count…
This article was originally published by a www.peoplesworld.org . Read the Original article here. .