This week, on a corner of Baxter Street in Lower Manhattan, the shabby New York courthouse where former President Donald J. Trump is on trial has been transformed into the backdrop for a comeback movement. he gushed to a lineup of cameras. The Speaker of the House stopped by. Supporters waved purple and red Trump flags in the spring fog.
The immediate next door was much quieter, but still had a lot of things worth noting. There, in another courtroom, another defendant with extraordinary powers, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, silently shuffled through a metal detector each morning to face his own criminal trial. .
The two are long-standing political adversaries, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, with vastly different styles and stories. Their cases had little in common other than vulgarity: one centered on hush-money payments to a porn star, the other on allegations of bribes paid in gold bars.
But in an unusual twist, their paths physically crossed this week, with another jury of New Yorkers calling the former president’s indictment the most serious ever brought against a sitting U.S. It took place all 500 feet from where one of the cases began to be tried. Senator.
New York City is no stranger to blockbuster courtroom dramas, many of which are concentrated in this cluster of courthouses and prisons, once known as the Five Points. The 1949 Alger Hiss perjury trial helped set the tone for the Cold War. Prosecutors have busted the mafia and al-Qaeda in court here. There are countless cases of political corruption.
But even by the standards of Manhattan (a tiny island where business titans, award-winning artists, and heads of state compete in restaurant booths and socialize at parties), simultaneous hearings would allow judges, historians, and court observers to Similarly, members of the public are unable to grasp anything close to a trial. precedent.
Robert Piggott, a lawyer and legal historian who leads a walking tour of the court district, said: “I can’t think of any other case where two major criminal trials involving politicians were so closely contested.” No,” he said.
“One is usually enough,” he added.
The 77-year-old Trump’s trial is a bigger spectacle, drawing together figures from Republican politics, weeks of live gavel-to-gavel news coverage and waves of rallies and counter-protests. On Thursday, supporters released dozens of pink phallus-shaped balloons with photos of the judge and district attorney assigned to the case.
Even if the charge of falsifying business records related to hush money payments sounds dry, the stakes are high. Trump, the party’s presumptive nominee, hopes his own lawsuit is just a traffic jam on his way back to the White House. But the conviction could ultimately land him in prison, despite three more criminal trials remaining in Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.
The charges against Mr. Menendez, 70, are more serious. Federal prosecutors said in court this week that as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he “traded his power” to travel to Egypt and New Jersey in exchange for big bribes, including money and a $60,000 Mercedes-Benz convertible. claimed to have supported a businessman. But while he is fighting for his legacy and freedom, even his closest allies in the Senate admit that his political career is likely over.
In Washington, the two were primarily partisan enemies. The senator twice voted to convict the former president on impeachment charges and once suggested that Trump was “compromising” with Russia. Even after Trump commuted the sentence of Menendez’s friend and former co-defendant in an earlier corruption case, he maintained he was “unfit.”
But hard times make for strange bed buddies. Trump expressed something like sympathy in September, not long after the senator himself was indicted on charges of secretly supporting a foreign power. The senator also said he “didn’t get along very well” with the Biden administration and that he, like himself, had been “attacked” by the Justice Department.
Both have maintained their innocence.
Trump is being tried on the 15th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse at 100 Center Street, a state courthouse near assembly areas in Chinatown, Little Italy and Tribeca. Menendez’s case is being heard on the 23rd floor of the nearby Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse. (Mr. Trump is no stranger to the building; he lost a libel suit against author E. Jean Carroll there earlier this year.)
Inside the courtroom, Trump is shaking his head, spewing obscenities and thinking. Mr. Menendez appeared even more amiable, singing to himself and giggling during a break in proceedings, as FBI agents testified that he spent his birthday raiding senators’ homes on Thursday. It looked like.
Sidney H. Stein, the bow-tie-wearing judge presiding over Mr. Menendez’s case, told potential jurors earlier in the week that “actual trials are not conducted the way they are shown on television.” No,” he said.
So some of the most high-profile proceedings in the Menendez case take place in a bleak cafeteria 15 floors below the courtroom, where judges, defendants and reporters mingle over tuna salad in plastic clamshells.
Fred Dives, one of the businessmen accused of bribing Mr. Menendez, was sitting there Monday when the court’s sketch artist left to draw a portrait. (Mr. Duybes also maintains his innocence.)
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Menendez was in the same room as his lawyers, preparing to attack the senator’s wife in opening arguments for the bullion. She was not in court. Neither were Mr. Menendez’s famous adult children, but he greeted the grill cooks like his old friends.
Mr. Trump is more constrained by Secret Service details, but he still orders from places like his favorite McDonald’s.
With its juxtaposition of vastness and everyday life, it’s hard to imagine it all playing out the same way in any other city, even Washington.
In his 1949 love letter to the vibrating city, “This Is New York,” E.B. White wrote: – Human conventions from Western countries) without giving that event to the inhabitants. ”
That was the case this week at Columbus Park, a small green space wedged between courthouses. If you were to stand on the same corner on Monday morning, for example, you would see Mr. Menendez arrive in a private car within minutes of Mr. Trump’s motorcade speeding down the same narrow road.
A group of Trump supporters gathered just in time. A man draped a Trump flag over a metal police fence. The woman pulled a bright red “Make American Great Again” hat from a gift bag and placed it on her head.
However, the women practicing Tai Chi nearby remained focused. The couples waiting with tickets at the marriage bureau across the street knew how special this day was, and it had nothing to do with trials, prosecutions, or politicians. The same goes for families preparing to bury their dead at a funeral home on the other side of the park.
As with many things in New York, the biggest thrills seem to come from out-of-towners.
The Australian couple, who had just gotten off an 18-hour flight from Singapore and were walking through Columbus Park just in time for Trump to arrive that day, were accidental tourists to the history of the law.
“For the past few days, we’ve been wondering where Mr. Trump’s trial is being held,” said Halina English, one of them. It turned out that their hotel was a 4 minute walk away. They were contested to discover not one, but two major trials.
“It’s historic,” she said. “In fact, anything that affects people in the United States also affects the rest of the world.”
The couple gave some thought to trying to participate in the senator’s trial. They chose coffee instead.
maria kramer, tracy tally and Nate Schweber Contributed to the report.
