“While we are living through the darkest hours of American history, I can say that at least for this moment right now, I am in great spirits,” ex-US president tells his supporters at his beachfront mansion in southern Florida.
(Reuters)
Donald Trump has supplied a full-throated defence of his conduct in his first public remarks since being charged over hush cash funds, blasting the felony prosecution as “an insult to our country.”
Hours earlier the 76-year-old former US president pleaded not responsible to 34 felony counts in a dramatic listening to in New York that transfixed the nation — and commenced the countdown to the primary ever felony trial of an American president.
“I never thought anything like this could happen in America — never thought it could happen,” Trump advised an viewers of a number of hundred donors, political allies and different supporters after returning to Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront mansion in southern Florida.
“The only crime that I’ve committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it… It’s an insult to our country.”
Trump — the frontrunner within the race for the 2024 Republican nomination — stated from a stage festooned with American flags in an opulent gold-and-cream ballroom that “radical left” prosecutors throughout the nation had been out to get him “at any cost.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting Trump for cooking his firm’s books to cover funds he organized to grownup movie actress Stormy Daniels days earlier than the 2016 election, to cowl up an alleged affair a decade earlier.
Trump’s former chief monetary officer Allen Weisselberg is serving a five-month jail time period for a similar cost of falsifying business data.
Manhattan prosecutors say Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”
A “statement of facts” launched alongside the indictment included particulars of hush cash funds to Daniels, Playboy mannequin Karen McDougal and a former Trump Tower doorman claiming to have a narrative a couple of little one Trump had out of wedlock.
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‘Darkest hours’
Daniels was paid $130,000 by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, whereas McDougal and the doorman obtained $150,000 and $30,000 respectively from AMI, the publishers of grocery store tabloid the National Enquirer.
Bragg alleges that Trump and his allies “also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments.”
Trump and his attorneys have accused Bragg of over-reaching in his characterization of the allegations.
The one-time actuality TV star had despatched a fundraising e-mail shortly earlier than flying again to Florida, saying that because the news of his indictment broke, his marketing campaign had raised over $10 million.
“While we are living through the darkest hours of American history, I can say that at least for this moment right now, I am in great spirits,” Trump stated.
The twice-impeached Republican is the primary sitting or former American president to be criminally indicted.
Earlier within the Manhattan courtroom, he answered “not guilty” to all fees in a transparent voice, sitting with hunched shoulders and at instances trying irritated however largely listening cooperatively.
Judge Juan Merchan stated a trial may probably begin as quickly as January — a month earlier than the presidential primaries kick off — though Trump’s attorneys have indicated they’d need it pushed again to subsequent spring.
Source: AFP
Source: www.trtworld.com
