The People v Donald Trump: Inside the first-ever criminal trial of an American president
In the weeks after he descended his beloved golden escalator from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to announce his presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump would arrange a scheme to bury compromising stories of his affairs to clear his path to the White House.
From that very same building, then candidate Trump allegedly orchestrated a plan to buy up damaging stories that threatened his candidacy, only to ensure they would never be published, and then reimbursed his attorney who paid off an adult film star whose story of an affair with the Republican nominee for the presidency threatened to derail his campaign.
Those reimbursements were allegedly falsified as business expenses – the crime at the centre of an alleged plot to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, one that will come into sharp relief during a weeks-long criminal trial in Manhattan that begins on 15 April.
The People of the State of New York v Donald J Trump is the first-ever criminal trial against an American president, falling in the middle of another election year, in a case that describes an attempt to manipulate the outcome of the election that launched him into political domination.
The case from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is the first among Mr Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial, and likely the former president’s only criminal trial before November’s general election.
According to prosecutors, it’s an election interference case, one that predates the criminal schemes alleged by federal prosecutors and state attorneys in Georgia in cases targeting then President Trump’s attempts to overturn 2020’s results.
Mr Trump, meanwhile, has accused prosecutors and judges of waging election interference against , and baselessly portrayed his mountain of legal obstacles as a Democratic-led conspiracy to keep him out of
