Former President of the United States Donald Trump had his request to withdraw charges in the Stormy Daniels case denied this Thursday (15). He is accused of falsifying payments to the porn actress between 2015 and 2017.
Trump declares himself innocent and claims that prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who is from the Democratic Party and was the one who criminally prosecuted him, has only electoral purposes.
At a hearing in New York, Judge Juan Merchan denied Trump’s request to dismiss the charges and scheduled the case for trial on March 25. The hearing lasted less than 10 minutes, according to Reuters.
With this, Donald Trump will be the first former president in the history of the United States to face a criminal trial.
The former president uses his social networks to criticize Bragg, calling him an activist and that he is linked to philanthropist George Soros.
It is worth remembering that the case against the former president began after a payment of US$130,000 to porn actress Stormy Daniels was discovered on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. Trump wanted to prevent her from telling a magazine that the two had an affair.
The prosecutor claims that the person who dispersed the US$130,000 paid to Stormy Daniels was Trump’s then lawyer, Michael Cohen, and that the money was recorded as a payment for Cohen’s legal services, and not as a disbursement made to ” buy the silence” of the porn actress.
The lawsuit claims that this accounting maneuver was illegal. Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017, when he was already president of the United States.
The former president admits that he ordered a payment to be made to silence the actress, but claims that it was not irregular.
Furthermore, the Prosecutor’s Office claims that, from August 2015 to December 2017, Trump organized a scheme to influence the 2016 election that consisted of identifying and purchasing negative information about him to prevent it from being published.