Case Stormy Daniels”, the first criminal case that will force the President Donald Trump to testify in court after being indicted by a grand jury this Thursday, has its origins in 2006 and has traveled a tortuous path that has mixed sex, fame, money and deceit.
– In 2006, Donald Trump, who has been married to Melania for a year, but is still far from politics, met Stormy Daniels during a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe.. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was a porn star that Trump promised to invite as a guest on his reality show The Apprentice. They had at least one sexual relationship (which Trump denies), but the invitation to the show never came through.
In 2016, in the last days of the presidential election campaign, Daniels tried to “sell” her story about a sexual relationship with a Republican candidate to someone who wanted to publish it, and Trump’s friend David Pecker got into a fight. the owner of The National Enquirer who bought the story from him in order to hide it and never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill”.
– Pecker negotiated with Trump’s personal adviser and attorney Michael Cohen to pay Daniels $130,000, an amount that first came out of Cohen’s pocket and was later reimbursed by the White House.
– In 2018, Cohen, after breaking up with Trump, pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including illegal election financing, stating that that $130,000 was disguised as a political donation, something he agreed to do on direct orders from his boss. This detail illegal election funding, this is what could make Trump’s crime especially serious.
– In 2019, Manhattan Attorney Cyrus Vance begins an investigation into this payment. Vance later leaves his post and Elvin Bragg selected as his successor in 2021 (in the United States, prosecutors are elected by popular vote), becoming the first African American to reach this post. Bragg reopens the investigation.
– Sometime in 2022, Bragg moves the case into the hands of a grand jury, a group of 23 citizens who play a role similar to a forensic investigation of the case, as they must determine if there is enough evidence to charge a crime and determine how much concrete is used. The Grand Jury considers only cases of a certain importance; for the less important, it is the judge who determines imputation or not.
“The Manhattan District Attorney’s grand jury hears multiple cases at the same time, and its deliberations are not public. Information was leaked to the press that during their meetings they interviewed Cohen’s former lawyer and publicist Pecker. However, he did not appear to have interrogated Daniels herself.
“Finally, when it was thought the grand jury would not rehear the case until the end of April, it made the historic decision Thursday to indict the former president of the United States.
Source: La Opinion
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