PALM BEACH: Donald Trump offered a full-throated defense of his conduct Tuesday in his first public remarks since being charged over hush money payments to a porn star, blasting the criminal prosecution as “an insult to our country.”
Hours earlier the 76-year-old former US president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts in a dramatic hearing in New York that transfixed the nation — and began the countdown to the first ever criminal trial of an American president.
“I never thought anything like this could happen in America — never thought it could happen,” Trump told an audience of several hundred donors, political allies and other 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 in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination — said from a stage festooned with American flags in an opulent gold-and-cream ballroom that “radical left” prosecutors across the country were out to get him “at any cost.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting Trump for cooking his company’s books to hide payments he arranged to adult film actress Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election, to cover up an alleged sexual encounter a decade earlier.
Trump’s former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg is serving a five-month jail term for the same charge of falsifying business records.
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” released alongside the indictment included details of hush money payments to Daniels, Playboy model Karen McDougal and a former Trump Tower doorman claiming to have a story about a child Trump had out of wedlock.
Daniels was paid $130,000 by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, while McDougal and the doorman got $150,000 and $30,000 respectively from AMI, the publishers of supermarket 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 lawyers have accused Bragg of over-reaching in his characterization of the allegations.
The one-time reality TV star had sent a fundraising email shortly before flying back to Florida, saying that since the news of his indictment broke, his 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 said.
The twice-impeached Republican is the first sitting or former American president to be criminally indicted.
Earlier in the Manhattan courtroom, he answered “not guilty” to all charges in a clear voice, sitting with hunched shoulders and at times looking annoyed but mostly listening cooperatively.
Judge Juan Merchan said a trial could potentially start as soon as January — a month before the presidential primaries kick off — although Trump’s lawyers have indicated they would want it pushed back to next spring.
In a spectacle that played out on live television — with rival protesters rallying outside — the hearing marked a watershed moment for the US criminal and political system.
A crowd of hundreds had gathered, with pro-Trump protesters — sporting “MAGA” hats and attire emblazoned with the American flag — yelling slurs at their opponents.
Trump for years rejoiced in his reputation as a playboy but has always denied the tryst with Daniels, which would have occurred just after his third wife Melania gave birth.
He faces a series of separate criminal investigations at state and federal level that could result in further — more serious — charges between now and Election Day.
They include his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state of Georgia, his handling of classified documents, and his involvement in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
While Republicans have largely rallied around Trump, President Joe Biden — mindful of his potential 2024 rival’s accusations that the judicial system is being politically “weaponized” — has refrained from commenting in any detail.
Defendant Trump slams criminal charges as ‘insult to our country’
https://arab.news/2c33n
Defendant Trump slams criminal charges as ‘insult to our country’
- Trump is being prosecuted for cooking his company’s books to hide payments he arranged to an adult film actress
- The former US president: ‘I never thought anything like this could happen in America’
Russia strikes power plant, kills four in Ukraine barrage
KHARKIV: Russia battered Ukraine with more than two dozen missiles and hundreds of drones early Tuesday, killing four people and pummelling another power plant, piling more pressure on Ukraine’s brittle energy system.
An AFP journalist in the eastern Kharkiv region, where four people were killed, saw firefighters battling a fire at a postal hub and rescue workers helping survivors by lamp light in freezing temperatures.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said “several hundred thousand” households near Kyiv were without power after the strikes, and again called on allies to bolster his country’s air defense systems.
“The world can respond to this Russian terror with new assistance packages for Ukraine,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on social media.
“Russia must come to learn that cold will not help it win the war,” he added.
Authorities in Kyiv and the surrounding region rolled out emergency power cuts in the hours after the attack, saying freezing temperatures were complicating their work.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy provider, said Russian forces had struck one of its power plants, saying it was the eighth such attack since October.
The operator did not reveal which of its plants was struck, but said Russia had attacked its power plants over 220 times since Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Daily attacks
Moscow has pummelled Ukraine with daily drone and missile barrages in recent months, targeting energy infrastructure and cutting power and heating in the frigid height of winter.
The Ukrainian air force said that Tuesday’s bombardment included 25 missiles and 247 drones.
The Kharkiv governor gave the death toll and added that six people were wounded in the overnight hit outside the region’s main city, also called Kharkiv.
White helmeted emergency workers could be seen clambering through the still-smoking wreckage of a building occupied by postal company Nova Poshta, in a video posted by the regional prosecutor’s office.
Within Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov said a Russian long-range drone struck a medical facility for children, causing a fire. No casualties were reported.
The overnight strikes hit other regions as well, including southern city Odesa.
Residential buildings, a hospital and a kindergarten were damaged, with at least five people wounded in two waves of attacks, regional governor Sergiy Lysak said.
Russia’s use last week of a nuclear-capable Oreshnik ballistic missile on Ukraine sparked condemnation from Kyiv’s allies, including Washington, which called it a “dangerous and inexplicable escalation of this war.”
Moscow on Monday said the missile hit an aviation repair factory in the Lviv region and that it was fired in response to Ukraine’s attempt to strike one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residences — a claim Kyiv denies and that Washington has said it does not believe happened.
