Former President Trump indicted by Manhattan grand jury

Former Pres. Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, multiple sources say.




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Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, according to multiple sources. Trump has become the first former president to face criminal charges.

The Democratic National Committee said in a statement Thursday, “No matter what happens in Trump’s upcoming legal proceedings, it’s obvious the Republican Party remains firmly in the hold of Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans."

The DNC vowed, "We will continue to hold Trump and all Republican candidates accountable for the extreme MAGA agenda that includes banning abortion, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and undermining free and fair elections.”

Donald Trump is calling his indictment a “political persecution.” A New York grand jury has voted to indict him for allegedly paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. It makes him the first former US president to face criminal charges. Jodi Schneider and Jack Fitzpatrick report on Bloomberg Television.
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The case brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, instead reportedly charges Trump for events that took place before he was president and uses a highly unusual legal theory based on a highly unusual set of facts — Trump’s payment of hush money to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 election to cover up an alleged affair that the two had while he was married. At the time of this writing, the charge(s) in the indictment against Trump have not been publicly confirmed, but for weeks, media outlets have reported that the alleged crime at issue would be Trump’s participation in falsifying his company’s business records to obscure the reason for the payment, which was characterized within the company as a legal retainer for Michael Cohen — Trump’s onetime lawyer turned mortal enemy following his stint in prison.

The unusual charge from the Manhattan DA’s office that is apparently at issue has already prompted a broad consensus among conservative politicians and commentators that Trump is the victim of a political prosecution — a “ hunt,” to use Trump’s preferred phrase. A Trump campaign email sent recently to supporters last week claimed that prosecutors in New York “chose their target first and have been hunting for a crime ever since.” Before the indictment came down, conservative legal commentator Andrew McCarthy, who is no fan of Trump as a political figure, argued that “it’s undeniable that no one who wasn’t Donald Trump would ever be charged for this.” Law professor Alan Dershowitz likewise said on Megyn Kelly’s show that “Nobody in their right mind would believe that Bragg would be going after John Smith or even John Edwards on a case like this. It’s obviously an example of ‘Get Trump’” — the name of Dershowitz’s latest book, in case you missed the promotional tie-in — “and it’s so, so dangerous.”

The investigation by the DA’s office was reportedly spurred by news of the payment to Daniels all the way back in 2018 under Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance. According to a Supreme Court filing during the office’s fight to get Trump’s tax returns, the office put its investigation on hold at the request of the Justice Department around the time of Cohen’s guilty plea to a variety of federal charges, including campaign finance violations related to the payment to Daniels. Prosecutors in Manhattan picked the investigation back up in the summer of 2019 after they learned that the federal investigation had been closed without further charges.

We are likely to hear a lot of clichés from the legal commentariat in the coming days — about how Bragg and his prosecutors are simply following the facts and the law, about how no one is above the law, and so on. That is all well and good, but the reality is that this particular criminal case probably never would have been brought for anyone but Trump. In fact, the investigation probably would not have begun in the first place for anyone else, but at the time, Trump was still in office, and given the Justice Department’s policy against indicting a sitting president, the Manhattan DA’s office was a convenient outlet and prosecutorial avenue for people who wanted to see Trump criminally prosecuted.

There is also no indication at the moment that the case against Trump has any real precedent in New York or elsewhere. Perhaps prosecutors will demonstrate that that is wrong as they defend the case in court, but thus far, no one seems to be able to identify a comparable case brought by a local prosecutor’s office.

Trump and his defenders may claim that the indictment should be dismissed because he is the victim of selective or malicious prosecution, but at the moment, a legal argument along those lines appears likely to fail. The reason is that the law generally requires robust evidence that the defendant has been singled out for an improper reason and that other, similarly situated people have not been criminally charged for similar conduct. Perhaps we will come to find out that plenty of other New Yorkers have allegedly paid off women they slept with to keep quiet, and that they did so in the middle of a federal election, but that seems unlikely — and that, in turn, is likely to doom any effort by Trump to get the case tossed on those grounds.