A Manhattan grand jury voted Thursday to indict former president Donald Trump in connection with a hush-money payment made to porn actress Stormy Daniels, according to multiple reports, making Trump the first former president in U.S. history to face criminal charges.
The indictment will likely be announced in the coming days, by which point District Attorney Alvin Bragg expects Trump to turn himself in.
The indictment accuses Trump of falsifying business records in relation to the hush-money payments. Daniels claimed in the final days of the 2016 presidential election that she had previously had a sexual affair with Trump. Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her claims.
Prosecutors claim Trump falsified internal business records to conceal the reimbursement payments to Cohen as legal expenses. Cohen claims Trump was aware of the misleading record keeping.
The indictment comes after Trump said last week that he would be arrested on March 20 and urged his supporters to protest outside the courthouse in Manhattan. The NYPD erected steel barricades outside Manhattan's Criminal Court Monday afternoon, signaling a big event could in fact be coming, but Tuesday came and went without a Trump arrest.
Ahead of the formal indictment, former vice president Mike Pence said the investigation smelled of "politically charged prosecution."
"I'm taken aback at the idea of indicting a former president of the United States, at a time when there's a crime wave in New York City," Pence said on ABC's This Week on Sunda. "The fact that the Manhattan DA thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority, I think . . . just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country."
Republican Senator Rand Paul said Tuesday that Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg should be locked up for dereliction of duty if Trump is indicted.
"A Trump indictment would be a disgusting abuse of power. The DA should be put in jail," the senator tweeted.
CNN previously reported that the president would likely present himself in Manhattan following the formal charges and he had expressed an interest in delivering a speech afterwards. Trump’s advisers have urged him not to call for protests, according to the report.
Trump, meanwhile, has been fundraising off of the situation. "If this political persecution goes unchallenged, one day it won't be me they're targeting . . . It'll be you," an email from Trump's campaign warned on Sunday, echoing Trump's 2024 kick-off speech in which he promised to act as his supporters' "retribution."
The indictment could be the first of several, as Trump faces investigations into his alleged mishandling of classified materials, his involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his involvement in the January 6 Capitol riot.
A federal judge ruled Friday that special counsel Jack Smith's team had enough evidence to support the claim that Trump "intentionally concealed" the existence of classified documents in his possession from his attorneys, ABC News first reported. U.S. Judge Beryl Howell said that prosecutors had made a "prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations," therefore dismissing the attorney-client privileges invoked by two of his lawyers. The judge ordered Trump attorney Evan Corcoran to testify before the grand jury investigating the documents case.
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