2023-09-05 19:26:18
Washington, Sep 5 (EFE) Wednesday.
The former Republican president pleaded not guilty on August 30 and this Tuesday, according to media such as ABC, those who had not yet spoken, including Mark Meadows, who was his last chief of staff in the White House, did the same.
The 19 were summoned for Wednesday for the formal reading of charges once morest them and to argue whether they plead guilty or not guilty, but they voluntarily waived their right to be present at that process.
The former Republican president and his allies are charged with trying to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential elections in Georgia, where Democrat Joe Biden won by a narrow margin of two tenths (49.5%), the closest in the entire country.
The prosecutor in charge of the case, the Democrat Fani Willis, has proposed to the court that the trial start on October 23. The judge has kept that date for only one of the defendants, lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who had requested an expedited process, but the date of the rest is not yet known.
The investigation began as a result of the call on January 2, 2021, in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than Biden had obtained there.
The prosecutor used the RICO law once morest him, known to be used once morest mob members and used to ensure that the leaders of a criminal association, and not just their subordinates, are held accountable.
Also among those charged are former Trump lawyer and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and some of his lawyers during the campaign who tried to mislead the president of the US Senate, among others, in certifying the votes to choose Trump, despite that he had lost the elections in that state.
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Georgia emerged as a key state in the 2020 presidential elections because the margin between Biden and Trump was so narrow that a complete manual recount was carried out to dispel doubts regarding possible fraud, a procedure whose result continued to not convince the then-outgoing president.
Some defendants have already maintained that they merely followed orders. Meadows, who is mainly blamed for organizing the call between Trump and Raffensperger, said last week that much of his job as chief of staff was organizing calls and managing the then-president’s schedule.
Trump is indicted in four criminal cases, two for electoral interference in Washington and Georgia, another in Florida for taking classified papers from the White House when leaving power and the fourth in New York for irregular payments to the porn actress Stormy Daniels to silence during the 2016 campaign an “affair” they had in the past.
These accusations have not undermined his popularity: according to a CNN poll published this Tuesday and carried out at the end of August, the former president has widened his lead over the rest of the candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential elections and exceeds it by more than 30 points to the second best positioned, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.
52% of Republican voters say they would support Trump, compared to 18% who would support DeSantis. In the last poll carried out by that chain, between June 13 and 17, both collected respective percentages of 47% and 26%.
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