Donald Trump lashed out Tuesday night at the New York City prosecutor whose investigation has made him the first former president forced to appear in a courtroom to respond to criminal charges.
“There is no crime, and it should never have been brought,” Trump told a ballroom full of dues-paying members and invited guests at his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida, hours after he pleaded not guilty to charges centering on his scheme to hide hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election.
He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg a “criminal” and a “radical left George Soros-backed prosecutor” who was simply out “to get” him. He also claimed the judge in the case, Justice Juan Merchan, was biased against him.
“I have a Trump-hating judge, with a Trump-hating wife and family,” he said.
The indictment handed up a grand jury last week and unsealed Tuesday afternoon lists 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. An accompanying “statement of facts” lays out a chronology of the plan by Trump, his then-lawyer Michael Cohen and David Pecker, publisher of the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, to quash negative stories about Trump that could emerge before the 2016 election.
As part of that, the tabloid paid $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to buy exclusive rights to her story about an affair she said she had with Trump, and Cohen paid $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about an affair with Trump.
The payment to Daniels came in the final days of the 2016 campaign, after Trump had already been damaged by the revelation of a video in which boasted of his ability to grab women by the genitals. Trump wound up winning the election by just 77,744 votes across three states ― making it possible that had the Daniels story emerged, it could have swung the result.
The reimbursement to Cohen was disguised as payments for legal services, even though Cohen had not done any legal work in that time period, giving rise to the records falsification charges. In all, there were 11 payments to Cohen, from February through December of 2017.
A year later, Cohen pleaded guilty to a federal charge of violating campaign finance laws, and Pecker admitted his role in a non-prosecution agreement.
Both men testified before the New York City grand jury that indicted Trump.
Trump’s aides had told some reporters that he would speak to reporters both before and after his court appearance in lower Manhattan earlier in the day, but he came and went without saying a word.
On the flight back to Florida on Tuesday afternoon, Trump again attacked Bragg and claimed he had done nothing wrong with his “totally legal $130,000 NDA,” or nondisclosure agreement.
Previously, he has called Bragg, who is Black, a “racist” beneficiary of liberal philanthropist George Soros and has warned of “death & destruction” if the case against him continues.
Trump delivered what has become a typical grievance-filled speech of late, spending 25 minutes lying about the 2020 election having been stolen from him through “millions” of illegal votes, complaining about the various investigations he has faced, attacking other prosecutors who are investigating him and generally claiming that he is being unfairly treated.
The New York case, though, is potentially the least of Trump’s troubles. A prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia, is examining Trump’s attempts to coerce state officials to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden in that state. The U.S. Department of Justice, meanwhile, is investigating Trump’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, when his coup attempt to remain in power led to a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his followers. The DOJ is separately looking at Trump’s refusal to turn over top-secret White House documents he retained in defiance of a subpoena.
All of those other investigations involve serious felonies that could lead to prison sentences of up to 20 years.
Despite all the criminal probes, though, Trump is running for the presidency again and leads in most polls of the 2024 race for the Republican nomination.