Trump is losing control of his fate due to legal threats
What’s in the Indictment of Donald Trump? The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office investigation of an alleged affair between Trump and Daniels
Former President Donald Trump is en route to New York City to surrender himself to authorities after his historic indictment by a Manhattan grand jury.
What’s in the indictment? The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office began when Trump was still in the White House and relates to a $130,000 payment made by Trump’s then-personal attorney Michael Cohen to Daniels in late October 2016, days before the presidential election, to silence her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the affair.
The indictment by a New York grand jury was unsealed Tuesday, providing the public and Trump’s legal team with details about the charges against him for the first time. Trump on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges.
“This is the first time that it really seems likely that the former president of the United States will be having a mugshot, being fingerprinted,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told NPR’s Morning Edition. Brinkley said “we’re in for a very rocky spring with Trump also facing a bunch of other criminal cases.”
The first court appearance for a former president – a logistical challenge for the New York district attorney and the Secret Service – Cyrus Vance
The first court appearance is for a criminal. A process that usually takes hours behind closed doors is when a normal person would appear for photographs, fingerprints and arrest paperwork.
Then, defendants go before a judge to hear the charges against them. A not guilty plea is the most common one for defendants at this stage in the criminal process.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has said repeatedly that the justice system should treat a former president the same way as any other defendant, a suggestion that Trump may have to go through many of the typical steps of an arraignment.
Even so, his status as a former president is expected to pose some unusual logistical challenges. He has a large legal team and a Secret Service detail. Protests are expected. There will be media attention. It will happen along with the everyday operations of the state court office.
“There’s a lot of external factors that just don’t happen for 99.99% of the cases we have,” said former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance in an NPR interview on Sunday. “It will be a real challenge for the [police department], the court officers, investigators in our office to ensure that things function safely and smoothly.”
The Prosecuting Defense of Donald Trump’s Indictment in New York and Mar-a-Lago: What Do They Have to Do?
Trump is scheduled to return to Florida, where he will hold an event on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, giving him a chance to respond to the charges against him.
Trump’s indictment raises plenty of unique legal and political questions, given his former job and the fact that he’s currently campaigning to hold the office again.
Kim Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former assistant U.S. attorney, says that he’s entitled to the same due process as everyone else.
She told All Things Considered that there are plenty of hurdles to get through first, and she said that potential charges against him and penalties they would carry are “way, way down the line.”
“There are a lot of procedural, evidentiary and constitutional protections in place to make sure that that far-off question is fairly adjudicated,” Wehle adds.
Key to a trial will be the strength of the evidence presented by prosecutors, legal experts said. The jury is a factor, said Michael Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina.
“This will not be decided by public opinion but by a group of people, 12 of them,” said Gerhardt. The lawyers for Mr. Trump will have to make sure the jurors are chosen fairly and that the jury does its job.
“If I had to pick which side to be on, and I had to win to save my life, I would probably choose to be on the prosecution’s side simply because the jury pool in Manhattan is so incredibly against Donald Trump,” he said in an interview with NPR.
Most similar cases would probably take a year to get to trial, Galluzzo says. He expects that Trump’s strategy will be to delay that process as much as possible.
The case for a multi-front defense against the ex-president: Donald Trump returns to New York before he faces a White House investigation
“They’re not going to make him an offer that he would accept,” he adds. “And I think more than anything he probably wants that public stage to play the victim, to have an audience.”
He may be required to appear in court at times. The pre-trial process will impose demands on a legal team that has often struggled to act coherently. Todd Blanche, another attorney, was brought in by Donald Trump to be his lead counsel, a move some saw as sidelining another attorney, Joe Tacopina. The camp for the ex-president disagreed with this interpretation.
And there are increasing signs that this new reality – which will come with hefty financial commitments in legal fees and locks on Trump’s calendar – could be multiplied at a time when he’s already facing the intense demands of another White House bid.
CNN’s Evan Perez reported Monday that Smith’s prosecutors obtained daily notes, emails, and photographs and are focusing on how Trump dealt with classified records around Mar-a-Lago and those who may have witnessed him. The Justice Department is taking steps that are consistent with the end of an investigation.
While Trump’s comments will signal how he intends to fight the charges against him in the political arena, the former president is also preparing for the fight in court: He added a new attorney, Todd Blanche, to serve as lead counsel on his defense team on Monday.
Trump made a big show on Monday of his return to New York ahead of his arraignment. The snaking motorcade of black Secret Service SUVs to and from his private Boeing 757 in its sparkling new livery carried overtones of a presidential movement in a power play meant to send a message of strength.
After court Tuesday, he will return to his Mar-a-Lago resort and reclaim the media spotlight with a primetime speech he will likely use to proclaim his innocence, attack the New York case as political persecution and try to distract from the fact he will be a criminal defendant.
One criminal prosecution is onerous enough. In each of the other cases Trump has not been charged, but a multi-front defense would be an extraordinary storm. And it would further disrupt the ex-president’s capacity to dictate his political schedule and control his destiny. Trump was able to use his popularity with GOP voters to get around the accusations against him in both the Russia investigation and impeachment. He pressured most GOP senators, who knew they would pay with their careers if they voted to convict him in an impeachment trial.
The situation is somewhat similar to the 2020 election, when the will of voters prevailed because Trump’s attempts to have votes thrown out and results changed foundered in multiple courts because of the fact-based standards of evidence and the law.
The New York Times: Donald Trump’s First Indictment of 34 First Degree Charges in the Media Circus and the Story of a Murder
The judge said Monday night that news outlets would not be allowed to broadcast the arraignment live. Trump and the courtroom will be photographed before the hearing begins.
If anyone knows how to thrive in a media circus, it is Trump. The difference, perhaps, in this case is that he fears being part of a media circus that he can no longer control.
An indictment was brought against Donald Trump on Tuesday for 34 felonies in the first degree.
Trump was seen entering a Manhattan courtroom for his arraignment at 2:28 p.m. ET, and left the courtroom at 3:25. When Trump entered the room, he was not restrained and did not speak during his exit. Trump was seen in photos seated at the defendant’s table in the courtroom, in between his lawyers Joe Tacopina and Susan Necheles. The New York police officers were standing behind the table.
The second instance took place in June of 2016 when Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate, alleged that she had an affair with Trump while he was married. Trump, Cohen and AMI’s CEO David Pecker “had a series of discussions about who should pay off [MacDougal] to secure her silence,” prosecutors say.
Prosecutors say that each check was paid as a monthly payment for legal services under a retainer agreement. “In truth, there was no retainer agreement,” reads a statement of fact that accompanied the charges.
Trump and his allies have questioned Cohen’s credibility. But at his news conference, DA Bragg said his investigators obtained texts, emails, contemporaneous phone records and testimony from multiple witnesses — information that would emerge at trial.
Bragg stated in a press release that Manhattan was home to the country’s most significant business market. New York businesses can’t manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.
The prosecutors say Trump orchestrated a scheme with executives at American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer. All three took place after Trump announced his candidacy for president in June of 2015.
Ultimately, AMI paid her $150,000 “on the understanding” from Cohen that Trump or his business would reimburse the publisher. (On the advice of AMI’s general counsel, that reimbursement never took place.)
Even as the magazine concluded that the story was false, executives agreed not to release the doorman from the agreement until after the election.
The final incident was the $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in October 2016, just before the election, to suppress her allegations of an affair at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006.
Bragg held a news conference after Trump appeared in court to clarify what the prosecutors think about two other crimes.
New York state election law makes it a crime to promote a candidacy through illegal means, Bragg said. False statements, like the misrepresentation to tax authorities of payments to Michael Cohen, could be included in this case.
Trump, who was twice impeached as president and still won a record-breaking number of electoral votes, tried to seize on the narrative potential of his day in court.
He traveled in a motorcade to the courthouse that was tracked by news networks. His 2024 election campaign began offering a T-shirt with a fake mug shot for a $47 donation.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump took a stage before an audience of his supporters, who were looking at the charges as political persecution.
“I never thought anything like this would happen in America,” Trump said to kick off his speech. “The only crime I have committed is to defend the nation from those who want to destroy it.”
A person who spoke directly with Trump said he was caught off guard by the grand jury indicting him. While the former president was bracing for an indictment, he began to believe news reports that a potential indictment was weeks – or more – away. The former president has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in the matter and continued his attacks on Bragg and other Democrats following news of the indictment.
The Manhattan DA case: Trump’s messages, his supporters, and the politics of the night in Manhattan, according to Quinnipiac data
Despite being on high alert throughout the day, Manhattan saw only small gatherings of Trump supporters around the courthouse, with reporters outnumbering the protestors.
Trump’s supporters are giving him their support in many other ways. His campaign had raised $10 million off the news of the indictment, according to adviser Jason Miller.
Across the GOP, Trump’s allies and his critics adopted similar messaging, with even Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, accusing Bragg of pushing “a political agenda.”
And as a measure of how that messaging lands, a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday found that two-thirds of all respondents think that the charges in New York are not that serious. Six in 10 say the investigation is politically motivated.
The venue for the case is in Manhattan, where voters overwhelmingly voted against Donald Trump in the presidential election.
Legal experts expected the Manhattan DA case to be “potentially the weakest” of the investigations, reports NPR’s Justice Correspondent Carrie Johnson.
