The criminal trial against former President Donald Trump for the “Stormy Daniels case” entered a crucial phase this Monday.
Trump is accused of falsifying documents to hide an alleged payment to the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels in order to buy her silence about an alleged relationship they had, and thus protect his 2016 election campaign, something he denies.
The parties will present their arguments in the second stage of this trial considered historic, since for the first time a former US president faces a criminal case.
In this process, which is expected to last for several weeks, the figure of Juan Manuel Merchana judge of Colombian origin who is in charge of the Manhattan court where Trump is being tried.
The former president and the magistrate in the case maintain a struggle that has transcended the limits of the trial and that has precedents.
In 2022, Juan Merchan presided over the tax fraud trial in which the financial director of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, was convicted.
He is also the judge in the fraud and money laundering case against Steve Bannon, staunch Trump ally.
This is, however, the most high-profile case that has passed through Merchan’s courtroom in its 17 years as a Supreme Court justice in New York County.
Trump, for his part, criticized the judge on social media, whom he repeatedly accused of corruption and feeling hatred towards him.
The former president and probable Republican candidate in the November presidential elections in the United States has made similar accusations against several judges and prosecutors in the various trials he has faced in recent months.
He donated $15 to Biden
Some conservative analysts have questioned Merchan’s impartiality after it emerged that the judge had donated $35 to the Democrats in the 2020 elections.
The amount included a $15 donation to Joe Biden’s campaign, NBC News reported, as well as two $10 donations to groups called the Progressive Turnout Project and Stop Republicans.
The state of New York, following the guidelines of the American Bar Association, prohibits judges from making contributions to political organizations or candidates.
Although the donation to Biden, and possibly also the donation to Stop Republicans, would be prohibited, they would be “considered trivial, especially given the small sums,” Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, told BBC News.
Judge Merchan did not deviate from the case despite these revelations and since then the matter has been losing media relevance.
Merchan’s daughter
The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, has been at the center of even greater controversy over the conflict of interest in this case.
Merchan is president of Authentic Campaigns, a firm that has worked on digital fundraising and advertising for Democratic clients, including Biden and Congressman Adam Schiff, who led Trump’s impeachment efforts.
Trump has pushed to have the judge removed from the case, citing his daughter’s position, but his efforts have failed.
Judge Merchan consulted the New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which determined that “the matter currently before the judge does not involve the judge’s family or family affairseither directly or indirectly.”
Once this was established, the judge refused to abandon the case.
Trump also criticized Loren Merchan on social media, prompting Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to request an expansion of the gag order against the former president to include the judge’s family.
Judge Merchan approved the request.
The order bans Trump from commenting about witnesses, jurors, court staff, prosecution lawyers and their families, although it does not prevent Trump from talking about the judge or prosecutor Bragg.
Merchan noted that the comments about his daughter “would undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitute a direct attack on the rule of law itself.”
Trump has criticized the gag order as violating his constitutional right to free speech.
From Bogotá to New York
Born in Bogotá in 1962, Juan Merchan is the youngest of six siblings and his father worked in the Colombian intelligence services, according to the New York Times.
Immigrated to the US with his family when I was 6 years oldwas the first in his family to go to university (according to sources cited by the New York newspaper) and began his legal career in 1994, when he graduated from Hofstra University Law School.
He worked as a prosecutor in the New York County District Attorney’s Office and as a deputy attorney general in Nassau and Suffolk counties before being appointed family court judge in 2006.
Judge Merchan has handled criminal matters in the New York County Supreme Court since 2009.
“He is a serious, intelligent and even-tempered jurist,” Ron Kuby, a Manhattan criminal defense attorney, told NBC News.
He stated of Merchan that “he is not one of those judges who yells at lawyers” and is characterized as “a sensible judge” who “always has control of the courtroom.”
In the case against the Trump Organization, Judge Merchan insisted that the charges were not at all politically motivated, even though the corporation’s defense attorney argued that its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, was being attacked for his association. with the former president.
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