Judge Moxila Upadhyaya entered the courtroom at 4:15 pm. She was 15 minutes late, which, according to reporters at the Washington federal courthouse, somewhat irritated Donald Trump, who was seated between his lawyers Todd Blanche and John Lauro. The court clerk read the title of the case: "Criminal case 23-257: United States of America v. Donald J. Trump."
On Thursday, August 3, in the same courtroom where Richard Nixon was ordered to hand over the tapes of his secret conversations during the Watergate scandal, Judge Upadhyaya was in charge of arraigning the 45th president of the United States for the "criminal scheme" of trying to stay in power despite his defeat in the November 2020 election. She set out to prove that no one is above the law. The accused was questioned according to the protocol applied to all defendants. Name? "Donald John Trump," replied the former president. Age? 77.
The judge ensured that the accused was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol and was informed that he had the right to remain silent. After listing the charges, she read out the maximum penalties incurred. Conspiracy to defraud the United States: five years. Conspiracy to obstruct official proceedings: twenty years. Obstruction of official proceedings: twenty years. Conspiracy against the right to vote: ten years. In total, a maximum of 55 years. "How does Mr. Trump plead?" she asked.
In Florida, where he was indicted on June 13, for retaining classified documents after leaving the White House, Trump hadn't uttered a word. This time, he stood up to answer himself: "Not guilty." Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the investigation, was seated in the front row. Several federal judges, including the chief judge of the capital's federal court, James Boasberg, made a point of attending the unprecedented event: For the first time in American history, a former president was being prosecuted for acts committed while in office.
The hearing lasted 27 minutes. Unlike the Florida indictment, no photos were taken of the defendant as he entered the courtroom. The television networks, which had not missed a minute of Trump's journey from his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, resumed live coverage of his motorcade as he headed back the moisture-glistening tarmac of Washington's Ronald Reagan airport. Shortly after 5 pm, Trump made a brief statement to the press under an umbrella bearing his name. "This is a very sad day for America," he said, and then launched into a digression on the state of the federal capital: "It was also very sad driving through Washington D.C. seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti. This is not the place that I left."
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