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Unraveling Former President Trump’s Legal Troubles

Ivan Moreno


New York Times

The former president has had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars across two trials in the past month. The first was on January 26, when a judge decided that Trump was liable for defamation against Elizabeth Jean Carroll in the case E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump and ordered him to pay $83.3 million to Carroll. This is in addition to the $5 million he had to pay her in 2023. The court also ruled Trump was liable for sexual abuse, and the defamation refers to how Trump denied Carrol’s rape allegation, saying that she “wasn’t his type” and suggesting that the allegation was a lie meant to help her sell more copies of her book.


In addition to those already serious allegations and large sums of money, the courts ordered Trump on the 16th to pay $355 million in his civil fraud case in New York. The judge ruled that he had lied about and dishonestly inflated the real scope of his wealth for years to help him get loans and receive lower interest rates to build his real estate business. Judge Arthur Engoron punished Trump, his company, and his executives, including his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for lying about his net worth in financial statements given to banks so he could acquire more loans and make deals more easily. Adding on interest, Trump owes over $450 million. And each day he does not pay, it increases by $87,502.


The former president denies the allegations and has sworn to appeal. The steep price he must pay was a huge hit financially and while it will not bankrupt him by any means, it still leaves him in somewhat of a cash crunch when it comes to financing his presidential campaign. The ruling also placed restrictions on his company, called the Trump Organization, in New York, saying that for three years, Trump can not run a company or receive loans from a New York bank, and the same restrictions go for his sons for two years. These restrictions further limit Trump’s ability to make the money he may require to run his campaign for November’s upcoming election.


Furthermore, former president Trump is currently undergoing several ongoing trials, encompassing a diverse set of charges across multiple levels of government. There are two cases related to the 2020 elections(one in the state of Georgia and one at the federal level), there is a case concerning the classified documents Trump illegally brought with him to his Mar-a-Lago home, and a “hush money” case, referring to the alleged scheming the former president committed to hide his extramarital affairs.


 Now, to unravel each case separately:


In Georgia, Trump was charged in August 2023 with plotting to overturn his slim defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The allegations include a phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, in which Trump tried to replace Georgia’s Democratic presidential electors with Republican electors more likely to vote for him, harassment of an election worker, and the unauthorized copying of data and software from elections equipment. Nineteen defendants are charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act(RICO). Trump faces 12 additional criminal counts, but with just the RICO charge he could face five to twenty years in prison.


Those are not the only charges Trump faces related to the 2020 election. In August 2023, Trump was charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the period leading up to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Prosecutors allege that Trump promoted election fraud lies, put pressure on state officials to overturn Biden’s victory, attempted to place fake electors in battleground states, and pressured Mike Pence, his vice president, to disturb the ceremonial recount of the election results to confirm Biden’s win. Trump is facing additional prison time for these charges, though the exact amount, if he is convicted, is hard to predict and is up to the judge.


The classified documents case refers to Trump illegally retaining classified documents after he left office in January 2021, taking them with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate, and refusing to return the documents to the government when demanded. Later he was hit with more charges, saying that he asked a staff member to delete surveillance video at the property, and for withholding a specific document, cited as a “Pentagon plan of attack” by the prosecutors, and allegedly showing it to visitors at his New Jersey golf club. The charges combine for Trump to face forty felony counts, all with specific guidelines and punishments, and a conviction would surely lead to some length of prison sentence.


Finally, the hush money indictment was the earliest of the four, happening on March 30, 2023, involving a scheme to hide allegations of Trump’s extramarital affairs during his first presidential campaign in 2016. Allegedly, Trump hid the true nature of his payments to his then personal lawyer Michael Cohen who helped him cover up his extramarital relations. The case then revolves around two women, porn star Stormi Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, who both claim to have had affairs with Trump outside of his marriage years earlier. Plus, the case also involves a Trump tower doorman who claimed to have a story about a child Trump had out of wedlock. While these stories are not inherently illegal, the indictment charges Trump with thirty-four counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, a felony in New York, though relatively low-level. Essentially, Trump’s company rewarded Cohen with reimbursements and bonuses for the hush money payments, disguised as legal payments.


Overall, the former president is currently faced with ninety-one counts from four different cases. What this means for his campaign and the implications of his trials for the elections are subject to speculation. This is an unprecedented situation in American politics. Never before has a former president been indicted in the history of the United States. As the cases advance, we can only watch and wait for the judges’ decisions, and wonder what they will mean for the greater scope of American politics.

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