A grand jury in New York City voted to indict Donald Trump on Thursday – the first time a former US president has faced criminal charges.
The landmark indictment comes in a case centered on $130,000 in payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claimed she slept with a married Trump in 2006, a claim she has denied. Trump classified his reimbursement of the payments as legal expenses.
A spokeswoman for the Manhattan DA’s office confirmed the indictment in a statement Thursday night.
“This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan DA’s office to face charges in a [state] Supreme Court indictment that remains under seal,” the spokesperson said. is selected.” (The Supreme Court is the name of the highest trial court in the state of New York.)
Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles told NBC News that Trump, who lives in Florida, is expected to have an arraignment on Tuesday. Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina said Thursday that he is expected to surrender to the Manhattan DA’s office.
“President Trump has been convicted. He committed no crime. We will vigorously contest this political trial in court,” Necheles and Tacopina said in a joint statement.
Trump is tentatively planned to appear before Acting Judge Juan Marchen after 2:15 p.m. ET. Two officials familiar with the matter said on Tuesday of his felony charge. Merchen presided over the DA’s successful tax fraud prosecution of Trump’s company last year.
The exact charge or charges are unknown because indictments are usually filed in court under seal after a vote by a grand jury in New York.
Manhattan District Attorney Bragg was known to focus on the criminal charge of falsifying business records. That charge carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison.
Trump condemned the news in a statement on Thursday evening.
“This is the highest level of political harassment and election interference in history,” Trump said in a statement. “The Democrats have lied, cheated, and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘get Trump,’ but now they have done the unthinkable – engaging a completely innocent person in the act of egregious election interference.”
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to the investigation, and he continues to call the investigation by Bragg’s office a partisan “witch hunt” against him. He has also accused Bragg, a Democrat who is black, of being “racist”.
Trump said this month that he would be arrested on March 21 and called for his supporters to “Protest, Protest, Protest!!!” issued a call on his social media website Truth Social. In recent days, he has ramped up his rhetoric, warning of “possible death and destruction” if he is indicted.
On Thursday, security was beefed up in the area where the grand jury was meeting. New York police, the FBI, and court officials are expected to coordinate security for Trump’s appearance at the courthouse with the Secret Service, which provides security for all former presidents.
Officials said the coordination will include negotiations about transportation and security needs for Trump to comply with the legal process.
Trump has said he has no plans to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, even if he is convicted. “Absolutely not,” he told reporters at an event this month.
The immediate reaction to his indictment split along party lines, with congressional Republicans accusing Bragg of prosecutorial abuse and Democrats hailing the grand jury’s decision that no one is above the law.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said on Twitter: “The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. said: “Mr. Trump is subject to the same laws as every American. He will be able to take advantage of the legal system and jury himself, not politics, to determine his fate. For facts and law. No extraneous political There should be no influence, intimidation or interference.”
The White House referred questions about the impeachment to the Democratic National Committee, where a spokesman said, “Regardless of what happens in Trump’s upcoming legal proceedings, it is clear that the Republican Party is firmly in the grip of Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.” Has been made.”
Trump’s 2024 opponents and potential rivals for the nomination were quick to come to his defense on Thursday. Former Vice President Mike Pence told CNN that the indictment was an “outrage”, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called it “un-American” and “the weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda”.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the first major GOP candidate to enter the race after Trump announced her bid, tweeted, “This is more about revenge than it is about justice.”
The indictment comes after years of investigation by the district attorney’s office, which accused the two companies of being part of the Trump Organization with a 15-year tax fraud scheme. The companies were found guilty last year and ordered to pay more than $1.6 million in fines and penalties.
A key witness in the current case is Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, and fixer.
Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court in 2018 to making illegal payments to Daniels for the “prime purpose of influencing” the 2016 presidential election, saying he did so at Trump’s direction. He was sentenced to three years in prison for that and other crimes.
Trump has acknowledged that he paid Cohen $130,000 but maintains the payment is legal. Trump tweeted in 2018 that the money was “not from the campaign” and that the deal was “a private contract between two parties, known as a nondisclosure agreement or NDA.”
Trump said on Twitter at the time, “The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionate allegations made by him about an affair … despite having already signed a detailed letter that no Wasn’t having an affair.”
Court filings from federal prosecutors in Cohen’s case show that the money was returned to him through payments coordinated through the Trump Organization.
“The company has accounted for these payments as legal expenses,” the filing said, even though “there was no such retainer agreement, and the monthly invoices submitted by Cohen were not in connection with any legal services provided in 2017.” “
Trump was never charged in the Justice Department-headed probe, but in court filings in Cohen’s case, investigators said they believed he was closely involved with the payments.
They noted that the money was paid because Trump was dealing with leaked audio from the show “Access Hollywood,” in which he said he liked kissing and groping “beautiful women.” “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he was recorded as saying.
FBI court filings state that “in the days following the Access Hollywood video, Cohen exchanged a series of calls, text messages and emails with Keith Davidson, who was [Daniel’s] attorney at the time, David Pecker.” and Dylan Howard of American Media Inc., the National Enquirer, Trump’s publisher, and Hope Hicks, who was then press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign.
The FBI filing states that Trump and Cohen spoke even on the day he paid the money to Daniels’ attorney and the day the deal was finalized.
AMI cooperated with the federal investigation into Cohen and admitted that he had paid another woman, Playboy model Karen McDougall, $150,000 to keep quiet about her alleged affair with him in order to help Trump’s campaign. The US attorney’s office said the publisher admitted to making payments “in association with a candidate’s presidential campaign”.
Tacopina, one of Trump’s lawyers, told MSNBC’s Ari Melber this month that the records were not falsified, because the money went to Cohen, Trump’s then-lawyer, and therefore was a legal expense. “It’s not a crime,” Tacopina said.
Cohen met repeatedly with prosecutors after the grand jury began hearing evidence in January, and Hicks was seen leaving a meeting with prosecutors this month. Peker testified before the grand jury on Monday and is believed to be the last witness the panel heard before voting to indict Trump.
Prosecutors offered Trump the chance to voluntarily testify before the grand jury this month — a sign the investigation was in its final stages — but he declined the offer. “We’re not convinced they’ll bring a case, but if they do we’ll deal with it,” Tacopina said as Trump was weighing how to proceed.
State prosecutors in Manhattan had for years looked at falsified business records as part of a larger investigation into Trump, a former team member told MSNBC this year amid concerns internally about the strength of the “zombie” case. Was
“You need the intent to commit or conceal another crime to make the offense of a falsified business record a felony,” Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor, told Rachel Maddow last month.
“When we first looked at this, we saw, gee, there’s a real risk here, a legal risk that if we bring down felony charges, they’ll get reduced to misdemeanors, and as you mentioned, we are doing a thorough investigation, other felony allegations. So for the first time in my tenure when this matter came up, we made the decision [to] quietly put the money situation on the table,” Pomerantz said.
“We referred to it internally in the office as the ‘zombie case,’ because it rose from the dead, went back to sleep, rose from the dead, and it happened multiple times,” he said.
Trump is also the subject of at least three other criminal investigations. Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fannie Willis is investigating whether she and her associates coordinated efforts to change the outcome of an election in the state.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, meanwhile, is overseeing the dual investigation into Trump’s actions around January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol and the Justice Department’s subpoena seeking the return of government documents and possible mishandling of documents their failure to comply.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in all three investigations and says he is being unfairly persecuted.