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Will Trump be indicted? What we know about the process
The decision whether to indict former President Donald Trump over hush-money payments made on his behalf during his 2016 presidential campaign lies with a Manhattan grand jury that has been hearing evidence in secret for weeks.
An indictment of Trump, who is seeking the White House again in 2024, would be an unprecedented moment in American history, the first criminal case against a former U.S. president.
Law enforcement officials are bracing for protests and the possibility of violence after Trump called on his supporters to protest ahead of a possible indictment.
An indictment could also test a Republican Party already divided over whether to support Trump next year, in part due to his efforts to undermine his 2020 election loss.
Trump denies any wrongdoing and has slammed the Manhattan district attorney’s office probe as politically motivated.
Here’s a look at the hush-money probe, grand jury process and possible ramifications for his presidential campaign:
WHAT’S THE PROBE ABOUT?
The grand jury has been probing Trump’s involvement in a $130,000 payment made in 2016 to the porn actor Stormy Daniels to keep her from going public about a sexual encounter she said she had with him years earlier. Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, through a shell company before being reimbursed by Trump, whose company, the Trump Organization, logged the reimbursements as legal expenses.
Earlier in 2016, Cohen also arranged for former Playboy model Karen McDougal to be paid $150,000 by the publisher of the supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer, which then squelched her story in a journalistically dubious practice known as “catch-and-kill.”
Trump denies having sex with either woman.
Trump’s company “grossed up” Cohen’s reimbursement for the Daniels payment to defray tax payments, according to federal prosecutors who filed criminal charges against the lawyer in connection with the payments in 2018. In all, Cohen got $360,000 plus a $60,000 bonus, for a total of $420,000. Cohen pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance law in connection him again face to face was not to be. I will always miss him. Through Vinnie and Bill, I met Charlie Lynch at Columbia too. Vinnie always knew where the parties were, and one enduring memory I have is of the four of us, underdressed, freezing our butts off on a street corner somewhere trying to find a taxi back to campus after a party.
Pew Center for Research noted that approximately 25% of Latino/a/x/e’s self-identified as Afrolatin, and among those 1/3 identified as Black, effectively 4-6 million self-idenified in the U.S. In changing the Categorizations, it will severely hamper any further opportunity we, the Afrolatinx community has to be counted and recognized.
AfroLatino Project
Once POTUS Biden racializes you by making Hispanics/Latinos/Latinx a “race,” you will find yourself ensnared in the battle for racial justice and equality that Black people of African descent and Indigenous Americans have been battling for over 300 years, and still today. Becoming a “race” in a country where it is used to disenfranchise is not all that.
Indeed, making Hispanics a race on top of the immigrant status, will subject you (those unable to pass for “white”, to prejudices rooted in biology in addition to citizenship status challenges that can never be reversed!
Becoming “White” in America
The Irish did it, yet still face religious stigma, and the Jews did it, yet Anti-Semitism is pervasive and resurfacing. The rich Cubans who abandoned their country after the Cuban Revolution in 195– like to pretend they are “white.” They marry white women, anglicize the pronunciation of their names and spend a lot of energy subjugating American Black people, and their own Indigenous and Afrolatinos people to show white Americans that they fit, and prove to their real white (American) masters that they have learned to authentically hate themselves, their heritage, and anyone, regardless of national origins, who is nonwhite. I imagine it is difficult for people like DeSantis and Rubio to go home every night and peer into the mirror chanting the mantra - I’m white, I’m white, when their native language, culture and history say otherwise!
The Continuing Rule of White Masters/Massa in the 21st Century? Now ask yourself, who gave this lowly white