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32 min ago
Defendant Trump slams criminal charges as 'insult to our country'
PALM BEACH - Donald Trump offered a full-throated defense of his conduct in his first public remarks since being charged over hush money payments to a porn star, blasting the criminal prosecution as "an insult to our country."
Hours earlier the 76-year-old former US president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts in a dramatic hearing in New York that transfixed the nation -- and began the countdown to the first ever criminal trial of an American president.
"I never thought anything like this could happen in America -- never thought it could happen," Trump told an audience of several hundred donors, political allies and other supporters after returning to Mar-a-Lago, his beachfront mansion in southern Florida.
"The only crime that I've committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it... It's an insult to our country."
Trump -- the frontrunner in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination -- said from a stage festooned with American flags in an opulent gold-and-cream ballroom that "radical left" prosecutors were out to get him "at any cost."
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting Trump for cooking his company's books to hide payments he arranged for adult film actress Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election, to cover up an alleged sexual encounter a decade earlier.
READ: Trump turns himself in to face historic criminal charges
Trump's former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg is serving a five-month jail term for the same charge of falsifying business records.
Manhattan prosecutors say Trump "repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election."
A "statement of facts" released alongside the indictment included details of hush money payments to Daniels, Playboy model Karen McDougal and a former Trump Tower doorman claiming to have a story about a child Trump had out of wedlock.
Bragg alleges that Trump and his allies "also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments."
Trump and his lawyers have accused Bragg of over-reaching in his characterisation of the alleged misconduct.
The twice-impeached Republican is the first sitting or former American president to be criminally indicted.
Earlier in the Manhattan courtroom, he answered "not guilty" to all charges in a clear voice, sitting with hunched shoulders and at times looking annoyed but mostly listening cooperatively.