Staring at the camera, frowning, defiant. This is the mugshot taken by the sheriff’s deputies of Fulton County in Georgia (United States) of the former president and presumptive Republican candidate for the 2024 White House elections, Donald Trump.
For his followers the photo is already iconic. During the 24 hours after its publication, Trump received $4.18 million for his campaign, the largest collection to that date. He sold t-shirts, stickers and mugs with his photo on them under the slogan “Never surrender.”
Former United States President Donald Trump. EFE/Cristóbal Herrera-Ulashkevich
But the photo is also a reminder that Trump, who throughout his life as a businessman was cheating Justice, enters the election year with legal cases of all kinds that will affect his campaign and perhaps the result of the elections. It remains to be seen whether they will do so positively or negatively.
If Trump were to emerge successfully from so much judicial imbroglio and reach the White House, he would make history by becoming the first American president to govern in two different terms.
This is the status of the four criminal proceedings that have taken shape in 2023 and that muddy his campaign months before the elections:
In Georgia, Trump receives the same treatment as a mafia boss
Trump is accused along with 14 accomplices of forming a criminal association with the aim of overturning the result of the 2020 presidential elections in Georgia.
The surprising accusation of criminal association is the same one that has been used in the past to dismantle mafia organizations. Prosecutors want to put Trump in the dock in August 2024, just three months before the elections.
At the heart of this case is the call that Trump made to the state’s highest electoral authority, Brad Raffensperger, days after the 2020 presidential elections, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” with which he would have taken Georgia from Joe Biden. A call that Raffensperger recorded and then leaked.
Former United States President Donald Trump. EFE/Justin Lane
In addition to the pressure on Raffensperger, prosecutors accuse Trump and his accomplices of trying to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the popular will expressed at the polls and of harassing a poll worker.
In total, the former president could be sentenced to a maximum of 76 and a half years in prison.
As Georgetown Law School professor David Super pointed out in an interview with Efe, the Georgia case is its “biggest threat,” since it is going faster than the others and Trump also has “little chance of stopping or delaying it.” . An added problem is that three of the four defendants who have already reached agreements with the Prosecutor’s Office are his former lawyers.
Washington DC: the assault on the Capitol
The refusal to accept the results of the 2020 elections is also the origin of the accusation he faces in a federal court in Washington DC, in this case for inciting the violent assault on the Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021, which left the world gaped and that undoubtedly marked his time in the White House.
Trump is accused of several crimes – the most serious being conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding – that could lead to a maximum of 55 years in prison.
Supporters of former US President Donald Trump during the assault on the Capitol in Washington. EFE/Jim Lo Scalzo
The trial is scheduled for March 4, 2024 in the federal capital. It will be one day before “Super Tuesday”, the big day of the primary elections, from which Trump could already emerge with the Republican candidacy assured.
Secret documents in a Florida basement
When Trump took classified and secret documents found by the FBI in a basement of his Florida mansion (Mar-a-Lago) from the White House, perhaps he did not think about the problems it could cause him.
The former president now faces 40 federal charges, most of them for deliberate withholding of national defense information. An accusation that could cost him up to 20 years in prison.
Because as has been seen in many images, it is not a folder with four papers, it was boxes and boxes with nearly 13,000 documents – 300 of them secret – crammed haphazardly throughout the basement and a bathroom of the mansion.
Former United States President Donald Trump (2-d) in the New York State Supreme Court. EFE/Eduardo Muñoz/Pool
The judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, has scheduled the start of the trial for May 20, 2024. A calendar that directly impacts the electoral campaign and, specifically, the primaries.
The one in New York is perhaps the most sensational of its cases. The former president is accused of falsifying accounting books in a series of payments to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Cohen – who pleaded guilty and served more than a year in prison – would have only acted as an intermediary for Trump’s payment of $130,000 to porn actress Stormy Daniels to buy her silence during the election period.
The former president wanted to cover up the fact that he had allegedly had sexual relations with Daniels in 2006. Shortly after marrying his current wife, Melania, and the son they have together, Barron, was born.
Can Trump be president if convicted?
That Trump will be convicted before the November 5 elections or even be in jail when they occur is a possibility that cannot be ruled out, but it is also likely that the trials will be postponed or lengthened and that he will not be able to sit in office. bench in the coming months.
A hypothetical conviction does not prevent him from running for office nor from his election as president.
Former United States President Donald Trump. EFE/Caroline Brehman
His election, however, would lead to an unprecedented legal crisis in the United States, which does not have in its legal system the assumption that an imprisoned person wins the elections.
The mess should surely be resolved by the courts, although there are other ways, such as Trump trying to pardon himself, an ace up his sleeve that he could only try in the federal cases in Florida and Washington. With EFE
