A grand jury in Manhattan voted Thursday to indict Donald Trump — the first time a former U.S. president has faced criminal charges. The indictment comes in a case centered on a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels claimed she slept with the married Trump in 2006, a claim the former president has denied. Trump had classified his reimbursement of the payout as a legal expense.
Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina told NBC News that the former president, who lives in Florida, is expected to surrender to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office early next week. A spokesperson for the DA's office said, “This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s Office for arraignment on a [New York] Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected.”
The exact charge or charges against Trump is unknown because indictments are typically filed in court under seal after a grand jury’s vote in New York. The Manhattan district attorney was known to be focusing on a felony charge of falsifying business records. That charge carries a maximum prison sentence of four years. Trump blasted the news in a statement Thursday evening.
"This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level 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’ve done the unthinkable — indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference." Trump's attorneys confirmed the indictment in a separate statement.
"President Trump has been indicted. He did not commit any crime. We will vigorously fight this political prosecution in Court," Tacopina and Susan Necheles said in a joint statement. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to the probe and called the investigation by Democratic Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office a continuation of the partisan “witch hunt” against him. He’s also accused Bragg, who’s Black, of being a “racist.”
Earlier this month, Trump said he’d be arrested on March 21 and issued a call on his social media website Truth Social for his supporters to “PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!” In recent days, Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric, warning last week of “potential death & destruction” if he gets indicted. Trump has said he has no plans to drop out of the 2024 presidential race even if he gets indicted. “Absolutely not,” he told reporters at an event earlier this month.
The indictment comes after a yearslong investigation by the D.A.’s office, which previously charged two companies that are 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 penalties and fines. 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 the illegal payment to Daniels for the “principal purpose of influencing” the 2016 presidential election and said 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 repaid Cohen the $130,000 but maintained the payment was legal. Trump tweeted in 2018 that the money was “not from the campaign” and that the deal had been “a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA.”
“The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair ... despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair,” Trump said on Twitter at the time. Court filings from federal prosecutors in Cohen’s case show he was paid back the money through payments that were coordinated through the Trump Organization.
“The Company accounted for these payments as legal expenses,” the filing said, even though “there was no such retainer agreement, and the monthly invoices Cohen submitted were not in connection with any legal services he had provided in 2017.”
Trump was never charged in the probe headed by the Justice Department he oversaw at the time, but in court filings from Cohen’s case, investigators said they believed he was closely involved with payment. They noted the money was paid as Trump was dealing with the fallout from leaked audio from the show “Access Hollywood,” in which Trump said he liked to kiss and grope “beautiful women.” “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he was recorded as saying.
The FBI court filing said that “in the days following the Access Hollywood video, Cohen exchanged a series of calls, text messages and emails with Keith Davidson, who was then (Daniels’) attorney, David Pecker and Dylan Howard of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, Trump, and Hope Hicks, who was then press secretary for Trump’s presidential campaign,” the filing said. Trump and Cohen also spoke the day he wired the money to Daniels’ attorney, and the day the deal was finalized, the FBI filing said.
AMI later cooperated with the federal investigation into Cohen, and acknowledged paying another woman, Playboy model Karen McDougal, $150,000 to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump in order to help his campaign. The U.S. Attorney’s office said the publisher admitted making the payment “in concert with a candidate’s presidential campaign.” Tacopina, one of Trump’s attorneys, told MSNBC’s Ari Melber this month that the records weren’t falsified, because the money went to Trump’s then-lawyer Cohen 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 the case in January, and Hicks was seen leaving a meeting with prosecutors this month. Pecker testified before the grand jury on Monday and is believed to be the last witness the panel heard from before its vote to indict Trump. Prosecutors had offered Trump a chance to voluntarily testify before the grand jury this month — a sign the investigation was in its final stages — but Trump declined the offer. “We are not convinced they will bring a case, but if so we will deal with it,” Tacopina said when Trump was weighing how to proceed.
State prosecutors in Manhattan had for years eyed the falsified business records as part of a larger investigation into Trump, with one former member of the team telling MSNBC earlier this year there were concerns internally about the strength of the “zombie” case. “You need the intent to commit or conceal another crime to raise the offense of a falsified business record to a felony from a misdemeanor,” the former prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, told Rachel Maddow last month.
“When we first looked at it, we saw, gee, there’s a real risk here, a legal risk that if we bring felony charges, they’ll be reduced to misdemeanors and we’re investigating a whole slew, as you mentioned, of other felony charges. So the first time in my tenure when this came up, we took the decision (of) let’s table the hush money situation,” Pomerantz said. “We referred to it in the office internally as the zombie case because it arose from the dead, went back into slumber, rose from the dead, and this happened a number of times,” he added.
Trump is also the subject of at least three other criminal probes. In Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating whether he and his allies coordinated attempts to alter the outcome of the election in the state. Special counsel Jack Smith, meanwhile, is overseeing dual probes into Trump’s actions around the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, and his failure to comply with a Justice Department subpoena demanding the return of government documents and possible mishandling of those documents. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all three probes and maintains he’s being unfairly persecuted.
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