Donald Trump pleaded not guilty this Thursday to the 13 charges that the Georgia state attorney's office charges him for conspiring, through mafia extortion and falsehoods, to reverse his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
The former president and candidate for re-election in 2024 resigned from the in-person arraignment that an Atlanta judge had scheduled for September 6, both for him and for the other 18 defendants in the case, including his former lawyer and former mayor. of New York, Rudy Giuliani, and former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
The written statement presented this Thursday avoids Trump a new hearing before the television cameras that were going to broadcast his personal appearance live, as they did just a week ago with his coming and going to the Fulton County jail, where he turned himself in and was signed with a mugshot that he immediately turned into a campaign image; It took his team minutes to print the photo on t-shirts and other fetishes that he put up for sale in a few hours to raise funds.
Trump has been released on bail of $200,000 since that day, pending the setting of a trial date. Although the prosecutor Fani Willis wants the hearing to start in October with all the defendants, that possibility is almost ruled out and it may even be that the trial is held after the one already scheduled for March 4 in the case of the Capitol and other attempts to falsify the elections: another of the four cases in which Trump is charged, along with the secret papers he illegally transferred and concealed at his Mar-a-Lago residence and the bribery of porn actress Stormy Daniels. In all of them he has pleaded not guilty.
In his statement today, the former president asked the judge to separate his case from that of those co-defendants who have requested a speedy trial. He insists that his trial take place after the 2024 election.
