Donald Trump has officially been arraigned on 34 counts of falsifying business records and conspiracy, making him the first former US president to be a defendant in a criminal case.
Mr Trump pleaded not guilty in proceedings before New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, the same judge who last year presided over the criminal tax fraud trial of two of the ex-president’s companies.
The indictment in People of the State of New York v Donald J Trump lays out the specific charges against the twice-impeached ex-president, who has spent the five days since it became known that he’d been indicted railing against the case and attacking the Manhattan prosecutors who are leading it.
It alleges that he falsified records to conceal payments to two women with whom he had affairs, in order to silence them and keep their accounts of their liaisons from harming his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election.
The women who Mr Trump is thought to have paid are Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Ms McDougal was paid $150,000 by the National Inquirer for her silence, while Ms Daniels was paid by Mr Trump’s then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, in a scheme which led to Cohen spending a year in federal prison and two more on home confinement.
The indictment against Mr Trump makes him the first former US president to face criminal charges in the country’s nearly 250-year history. Federal authorities once considered seeking an indictment against former president Richard Nixon for crimes he committed while in office, but the pardon issued to him by his successor, Gerald Ford, made charging him impossible.
Unlike the charges that were never filed against Nixon, who died in 1994, the charges against Mr Trump have been filed in state court and cannot be short-circuited by a future presidential pardon.
If convicted, he could face at least a year in prison on each count, but it’s unlikely that a first-time offender such as himself would be sentenced to prison rather than probation.
