Former President DonaldJ. Trump appeared in civil court in Washington on Thursday for the first time to face charges that he conspired to remain in office despite his 2020 election loss, contending not shamefaced at a hail conducted in the shadow of the Capitol, where his sympathizers, fueled by his falsehoods, had rampaged to block the peaceful transfer of power. Trump was reserved and fingerprinted before entering the courtroom and offering a soft-spoken “not shamefaced” to each of the four counts lodged against him on Tuesday by Jack Smith, the special counsel. He was allowed to leave court without paying any bail or agreeing to any trip restrictions. A first pretrial hail was set for Aug. 28. Trump arrived in Washington in the remarkable position of being under charge in three separate cases as he’s running for chairman again. In addition to the election case, he faces civil charges of mishandling classified documents and allegations in New York affiliated with hush plutocrat payments to a porn star. But indeed, as he sped in and out of Federal District Court in about an hour and a half, he was leading his rivals for the 2024 Democratic nomination by wide perimeters and remained recalcitrant. “This is a veritably sad day for America,” Mr. Trump said at the field in Washington before boarding his airplane back to his golf club in New Jersey. “This is a persecution of a political opponent. This was in no way supposed to be in America.”
Holding his marquee for him as he surfaced from his SUV on the tarmac was Walt Nauta, his particular assistant, who was charged alongside him in the classified- documents case. Thursday’s hail was held inside a courthouse that has been the venue for hundreds of trials stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His attorneys used the procedural hail to hint at one of his central defense strategies — a request to delay an alternate pending civil trial for months if not times. The censure took place about six weeks after he entered another not- shamefaced plea in a Miami courtroom after being criminated on charges of immorally retaining classified documents at his resort in Florida and gumming the government’s sweats to reclaim them. Thursday’s censure had deeper literal resonance. It began a process in which civil prosecutors will seek to hold Mr. Trump to regard for what they say was his turn down to cleave to core popular principles, a trial that will be held little more than an afar and a half from the White House and at the bottom of the Capitol complex where his sympathizers chanted two and a half times ago for his vice chairman to be hanged and tried to block Congress from certifying President Biden’s palm.
The charge charged that Mr. Trump prevaricated constantly to promote false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims, and oversaw a scheme to produce false slates of pickers pledged to him in countries that. Biden had won. And it described how he eventually dragooned his vice chairman, Mike Pence, to use so-called fake pickers to lessen the instrument of the election at a common session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, that was cut short by the violence at the Capitol. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya, who oversaw the roughly partial-hour input hail on Thursday, ordered Mr. Trump not to communicate about the case with any substantiations except through attorneys or in the presence of attorneys. She set the first hail before the trial judge, Tanya. Chutkan, for Aug. 28 the date chosen by Mr. Trump’s attorneys from among the three options she handed and the rearmost of them.