NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump faces multiple charges of falsifying business records, including at least one felony count, in an indictment handed down by a Manhattan grand jury, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday. .
He will be formally arrested and charged Tuesday in the quiet money case, setting the scene for a harrowing historic moment when the former president is forced to stand before a judge to hear the criminal charges against him.
The indictment remains sealed and the specific charges were not immediately known, but the details were confirmed by a person who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information not yet public.
The streets outside the court where the arraignment will open on Friday were quiet compared to last week. There were no large-scale demonstrations for or against Trump, although tourists stopped to take selfies and many journalists and police officers still gathered.
When Trump comes in, he will be booked much like anyone else facing charges, mugged, fingerprinted and more. But he was not expected to be put in handcuffs; he will have Secret Service protection and will almost certainly be released the same day.
In the meantime, Trump’s legal team is preparing its defense while the prosecutor’s office defends the grand jury investigation that led the matter to trial. Congressional Republicans, as well as Trump himself, insist that the whole thing is politically motivated.
“We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory charges, withdraw the request for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without illegitimate political interference,” Leslie Dubeck, general counsel in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, wrote in a letter. Friday up to three Republican House committee seats obtained by The Associated Press.
The case plunges the US into uncharted legal waters, with Trump the first former president to face indictment. And the political implications could be titanic ahead of next year’s presidential election. Trump is in the midst of his third term as president and has said the case could derail his efforts — even though his campaign has raised money by mentioning it.
The Trump campaign said it raised $4-plus million in the first 24 hours after news of the indictment broke.
Top Republicans have also begun to close ranks around him. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has pledged to use congressional oversight to investigate Bragg. Representatives James Comer, Jim Jordan and Bryan Steil, chairmen of the committee Bragg spoke of in the letter, have asked the district attorney’s office for testimony, documents and copies of communications with the Department of Justice.
Trump’s indictment comes after a grand jury investigation into money he paid during the 2016 presidential campaign to drop allegations of extramarital sex. The indictment remains sealed, as is standard in New York before arraignment.
The investigation probed six-figure payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Both claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Trump married years before he entered politics. He denied having sexual relations with either woman.
Trump also denied any wrongdoing related to the payments and dismissed the investigation as “fraud”, “persecution”, and unfairness. He shouted in capital letters on social media platforms that the Democrats had “GORO, CHEAT” and other things to spoil the 2024 presidential election.
AP Photo / Rebecca Blackwell
Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina said in a TV interview on Friday that he would “very aggressively” challenge the legal validity of the Manhattan grand jury’s indictment. Trump himself, on the social media platform, trained his anger on the new target, complaining that the judge expected in the case, Juan Manuel Merchan, “HATES ME.”
The former president is expected to fly to New York on Monday and stay at Trump Tower overnight before Tuesday’s planned arraignment, according to two people familiar with the plan who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s trip.
Trump will be tried in the same Manhattan courtroom where his company was tried and convicted of tax fraud in December and where Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial took place. On Friday, officials from the Secret Service and the NYPD visited the courthouse and met about security plans.
Court officials eventually sealed off and secured access to the 15th floor, where Merchan continued to preside over unrelated matters, until Trump’s arraignment.
Lawyers involved in the case and some employees were allowed to stay, but the media were chased away by officers, who stood in front of a barricade of bicycle racks set up in the hallway. An officer yelled at reporters who dared to go up, “This floor is closed,” and told them to get back in the elevator and leave.
“Officers have been warned to remain alert and maintain situational awareness, both inside the courthouse and while patrolling the perimeter, as evidenced by the incident Tuesday afternoon outside Manhattan Supreme Court,” the court said in a statement.
Since Trump’s March 18 tweet acknowledging his arrest was imminent, authorities have stepped up security, deploying additional police officers, barricading streets around the courthouse and deploying bomb-sniffing dogs. He had to respond to bomb and death threats, a suspicious powder scare and a pro-Trump protester who was arrested Tuesday after witnesses said he pulled a knife on a passerby.
Because no former president has been charged with a crime, there is no rulebook for ordering defendants. They will be fingerprinted and mugged, and investigators will complete arrest documents and check to see if they have criminal charges or outstanding warrants, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the sensitive security operation.
All these activities are away from the public. New York law discourages the release of cup shots in most cases. Less clear is whether Trump will seek to have the images released himself, for political or other reasons.
After the order is completed, the former president will appear before a judge for an afternoon arraignment.
Even for defendants who surrender, answering criminal charges in New York generally requires at least a few hours of detention while they are fingerprinted, photographed, and undergo other procedures.
As for the allegations, when Trump ran for president in 2016, his allies paid two women to bury the allegations. The supermarket tabloid publisher National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 for the right to tell her story and sit on it, in an arrangement brokered by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
After Cohen himself paid Daniels $130,000, Trump’s company reimbursed him, added a bonus and listed the payment as legal fees.
Federal prosecutors argued — in a 2018 criminal case against Cohen — that the payments amounted to illegal aid to the Trump campaign. Cohen pleaded guilty to charges of campaign finance violations, but federal prosecutors did not pursue Trump, who was then in the White House. However, some of those submitted to the court obliquely implicated people who know about payment arrangements.
The New York indictment comes as Trump contends with another investigation. In Atlanta, prosecutors are weighing whether they committed a crime when they tried to get Georgia officials to overturn their narrow 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
And, at the federal level, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department is also investigating Trump’s efforts to tamper with national election results. In addition, the special counsel is looking into how and why Trump held a cache of classified government documents at his Florida club and home, Mar-a-Lago, and whether the former president or his deputy tried to block the investigation into those documents. .
Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz and Jill Colvin in New York and Michael Balsamo and Farnoush Amiri in Washington contributed to this report.
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