- Donald J. Trump will be the first former US president to face criminal charges.
- The exact charges are not yet specified, but the case is focused on a hush-money payment to a porn star during Trump's 2016 campaign.
A Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star. This is a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark Donald Trump as the first former US president to face criminal charges.
On Thursday evening, after news of the charges had been widely reported, the district attorney’s office confirmed that Mr. Trump had been indicted and that prosecutors had contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to authorities in Manhattan.
Mr. Trump is likely to turn himself in on Tuesday, at which point the former president will be photographed and fingerprinted in the bowels of a New York State courthouse, with Secret Service agents in tow. He will then be arraigned, at which point the specific charges will be unsealed. Mr. Trump faces more than two dozen counts, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Trump has for decades avoided criminal charges despite persistent scrutiny and repeated investigations, creating an aura of legal invincibility that the indictment now threatens to puncture.
But unlike the investigations that arose from his time in the White House, which examined his strong-arm tactics on the international stage, his attempts to overturn the election and his summoning of a mob to the U.S. Capitol — this case is built around a tawdry episode that predates Mr. 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.
In a statement, Donald J. Trump lashed out at the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, and portrayed the case as the continuation of a politically motivated witch hunt against him.
Donald Trump continued to say that the persecution was political and election interference at the highest level in history. He called Mr. Bragg “a disgrace” and casted himself as a completely innocent person.
Donald Trump has consistently denied all wrongdoing. He is calling on his followers to protest his arrest. Mr. Trump has also denied any affair with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, who had been looking to sell her story of a tryst with Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Susan R. Necheles and Joseph Tacopina, said in a statement that Donald Trump did not commit any crime and that they will vigorously fight this political prosecution in court.
The first sign that an indictment was imminent on Thursday came just before 1400 hours, when the three lead prosecutors on the Trump investigation walked into the Lower Manhattan building where the grand jury was sitting. One of them carried a copy of the penal law, which was most likely used to read the criminal statutes to the grand jurors before they voted.
Nearly three hours later, the prosecutors walked into the court clerk’s office through a back door to begin the official process of filing the indictment, arriving about two minutes before the office closed for the day.
Mr. Bragg is the first prosecutor to indict Donald Trump; but he might not be the last. Donald Trump’s actions surrounding his electoral defeat are now the focus of a separate federal investigation, and a Georgia prosecutor is in the final stages of an investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to alter the election results in the state of Georgia.
The Manhattan indictment is a product of a nearly five-year investigation and, it kicks off a volatile new phase in Donald Trump’s post-presidential life as he makes a third run for the White House.
Additionally, Trump's legal woes will throw the race for the Republican nomination, into uncharted territory. Donald Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and the former VP, Mike Pence are top Republicans who've announced their presidential candidacy.
Usually, an indictment would deal a fatal blow to a presidential candidacy. But Donald Trump is not a usual candidate. He has already said that he would not abandon the race if he were charged, and the case might even help him in the short term as he paints himself as a victim of political witchunt.
The indictment also raises the prospect of an explosive backlash from Donald Trump, who often uses his legal woes to stoke the rage of his die-hard MAGA Republicans.
Immediately after the vote to indict Mr Trump, the former president attacked Mr. Bragg, the first Black man to lead the district attorney’s office, calling him a “racist,” an “animal” and a “radical left prosecutor.”
A trial is just months away. It will take time for Mr. Trump’s lawyers to argue the case be thrown out. This timeline raises the possibility of a trial unfolding during the 2024 presidential campaign period.
The case would come before a jury six years after Mr. Cohen’s federal guilty plea prompted the district attorney’s office to open an investigation into Mr. Trump’s role in the hush-money saga.
Over the years, the investigation expanded to include whether Donald Trump had lied about his net worth on annual financial statements.
This developing story shall be updated as soon as new information is available.
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