donald trump has always believed in the maxim that no negative publicity and throughout his business and political career he has masterfully managed to take advantage of it. The former president of the United States has ratified it in the last four months, converting his historic four criminal charges in effective machines for fundraising and continue to bolster his lead in the Republican race to become a 2024 presidential candidate again. Even for someone like him, however, the law also dictates its rules. And in Georgia, where prosecutor Fani Willis charged him last week under a law that persecutes organized crime with 13 charges (which raise his total already until the 91), has come across what is considered for now as its greater criminal, political and personal challenge.
Trump’s strategy of exploit your legal problems in your favor took shape again this Thursday in Atlanta. Through his legal team, tweaked at the last minute to incorporate a prestigious local criminal lawyer, Trump had negotiated his surrender to the authorities in the Fulton County Jail for the late. And it was not a casual negotiation: with that schedule, which, according to the closure of the airspace decreed over the prison, moved between 6:45 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. premises (six more in mainland Spain), made it coincide with the prime time television.
In that jail, infamous due to its poor conditions, investigated for the recent death of a prisoner who was found covered in bedbugs and lice and where the prisoners take advantage of the collapse of their walls to make homemade weapons, Trump was going to be booked before being left in released on an agreed bail of $200,000. And like 11 of the 18 other co-conspirators also indicted in the case and already indicted, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday and his former chief of staff this Thursday at noon, Mark Meadowsfaced the possibility of being portrayed with a photo for your tab, for which, also under normal conditions, fingerprints are taken and a medical check-up is carried out, which later allows weight and height to be made public. This time it would be a real photograph, not like the fake one that the Trump campaign began to use to sell “merchandise & rdquor; when the imputation of him was announced last Monday.
A complete and complicated case
Trump self-interestedly exploits the Georgia case, which, like the other two brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith and by Alvin Bragg in New York, he denounces as part of an alleged “Witch hunt” and how “political persecution” and “electoral interference& rdquor ;, alleging that Joe Biden politically uses prosecutors and the Department of Justice to harm his main rival and Republican favorite. But he is undoubtedly also aware of the monumental risk posed by an indictment in which he and 18 other defendants are accused of operating as “a criminal organization whose members and associates participated in various related criminal activities & rdquor; to try to change the 2020 election results in the state, including by falsifying documents and statements, impersonating a public official, attempting to bribe witnesses, computer theftconspiracy to defraud the State and acts related to the heist and perjury.
Unlike Smith’s federal indictments, Willis’s, the most detailed and completeis stateand that makes not even trump himself if he were to be re-elected president, nor could any Republican potentially making it to the Oval Office give him a pardon. should he be convicted, a result that Trump, of course, 77 yearscould bring you a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. In Georgia, under the state constitution, that power rests solely with the parole and parole board, which requires at least five years of a sentence to be served before you can apply for a parole.
Cameras and a process like that of gangsters
The restrictions on cameras in the courts that affect the federal cases and the New York case do not apply in the case of Georgia, which prevails transparency. And in Fulton County the trial could be totally or partially televised to Trump, which could be held expeditiously. Last week the prosecutor suggested that the investigative hearings for the 19 defendants to plead guilty or not guilty be held in the week of September 5 and although she also then proposed that the trial begin in March, this same Thursday she filed a motion in response to one of the defendants suggesting it start on October 23.
Although many experts do not consider such a timetable realistic, and motions are expected to delay the process Of Trump’s lawyers and other defendants, the judge assigned to the case, Scott McAfee, has already given the green light to the cameras for the first proceedings. And even for someone as media-savvy as Trump, they can be Devastating images of a trial comparable to those of gangsterswith all the defendants together if Willis achieves his goal, and the public and detailed exposure of the plot to reverse the legal result of the elections in the state.
Conditions and threats
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The bail imposed on Trump in Georgia also comes associated with conditions. According to the document agreed between the prosecutor’s office and the former president’s lawyers and signed on Monday by McAfee, Trump is prohibited from carrying out “no act to intimidate anyone that you know that you are a defendant or a witness in this case or block up in any other way that justice is administered & rdquor ;. In addition, he is prohibited from making “a direct or indirect threat of any nature & rdquor ;, something that includes”messages on social networks or propagation of messages posted by another individual & rdquor ;.
Definitely part of the concern relates to Willis, a black prosecutor, who has already been assigned additional security reinforcements near her home by law enforcement in recent weeks given the Threats both personal and to your office. And Republican allies of the former president have also stepped up the pressure on her. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has opened an investigation into the prosecutor, to whom he has sent a letter requesting documentation and suggesting that he has acted with political motivation. It’s the same thing that Jordan and the committee already did with Bragg, the prosecutor, as black Willis, in the New York case.