Donald J. Trump in March in National Harbor, Md.: NAJ screen shot
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Manhattan Grand Jury voted Thursday in New York to issue the first criminal indictment in American history against a former president. Donald Trump will be the first former president to face criminal charges in a case focused on a hush-money payment to a porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign.
This was first reported by The New York Times and a few other news outlets, according to four people with knowledge of the matter, and it is being reported as an “unprecedented case” with “wide-ranging implications,” and “a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.”
Update: Later reporting indicates Trump will turn himself in on Tuesday, April 4.
The felony indictment, filed under seal by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, will likely be announced in the coming days. Prosecutors working for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, will have asked Trump to surrender and to face arraignment on charges that remain unknown for now.
“Trump has for decades avoided criminal charges despite persistent scrutiny and repeated investigations, creating an aura of legal invincibility that the vote to indict now threatens to puncture,” the Times reports.
Trump is still under investigation by a state grand jury for tampering with the 2020 election in Georgia, for obstruction of justice by a special Department of Justice prosecutor for refusing to cooperate with the FBI in his handling of classified documents after leaving office, and most significantly, for engaging in a seditious conspiracy and inciting a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the peaceful transfer of power and stop the certification of the 2020 election by Congress.
But unlike the investigations that arose from his time in the White House, this case is built around a “tawdry episode,” the Times says, that predates Trump’s presidency. The reality star turned presidential candidate who shocked the political establishment by winning the White House now faces a reckoning for a hush money payment that buried a sex scandal in the final days of the 2016 campaign.
Trump has consistently denied all wrongdoing and attacked Bragg, a Democrat, accusing him of leading a politically motivated prosecution. He has also denied any affair with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, who had been looking to sell her story of a tryst with Trump during the campaign.
Bragg and his lawyers will likely attempt to negotiate Trump’s surrender. If he agrees, it will raise the prospect of a former president, with the Secret Service in tow, being photographed and fingerprinted in the bowels of a New York State courthouse.
The prosecution’s star witness is Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s former fixer who paid the $130,000 to keep Daniels quiet. Cohen has said that Trump directed him to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence, and that Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization, helped cover it up. The company’s internal records falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses, which helped conceal the purpose of the payments.
Although the specific charges remain unknown, Bragg’s prosecutors have zeroed in on that hush money payment and the false records created by Trump’s company. A conviction is not a sure thing: An attempt to combine a charge relating to the false records with an election violation relating to the payment to Daniels would be based on a legal theory that has yet to be evaluated by judges, raising the possibility that a court could throw out or limit the charges.
“The vote to indict, the product of a nearly five-year investigation, kicks off a new and volatile phase in Mr. Trump’s post-presidential life as he makes a third run for the White House. And it could throw the race for the Republican nomination — which he leads in most polls — into uncharted territory,” the Times says.
Bragg gets his name in the history books for being the first prosecutor to lead an indictment of Trump, “now likely to become a national figure enduring a harsh political spotlight,” as the Times reports.
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