Indictment filed in NY makes Trump first US president to face criminal charges The indictment of Donald Trump in his home state ramps up one of several criminal investigations facing the former president in the early days of his 2024 campaign.

 

Indictment filed in NY makes Trump first US president to face criminal charges

The indictment of Donald Trump in his home state ramps up one of several criminal investigations facing the former president in the early days of his 2024 campaign.

JOSH RUSSELL / March 30, 2023

MANHATTAN (CN) — Donald Trump will face criminal charges after a Manhattan grand jury returned an unprecedented indictment Thursday related to the payment of hush money during his 2016 run for office.

While the charging papers remain under seal, and there is no announcement yet from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, Trump's lawyer Joseph Tacopina has confirmed the news early this eventing and his campaign acknowledged the charges as well 30 minutes later.

"This is not an indictment of a crime — there was no crime — instead, this news is the indictment of a failed nation," the campaign said, framing the charges as a deep-state effort to undermine Trump's candidacy.

"They will fail," the campaign statement continues. "He will be re-elected in the greatest landslide in American history, and together we will all Make America Great Again."

The indictment, which is the first ever against a current or former U.S. president, is expected to tie Trump explicitly to an otherwise known criminal conspiracy: payments that were made weeks before the 2016 presidential election to porn actress Stormy Daniels and to Playboy playmate Karen McDougal so that neither woman would make public statements about extramarital affairs they claimed to have had with Trump.

Trump did not make the payments himself, but his company made a log of "legal expenses" when it reimbursed his former personal attorney and longtime “fixer” Michael Cohen, who personally cut Daniels a check for $130,000 from Essential Consultants, a shell entity formed just weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

Cohen admitted to facilitating the payments — McDougal's check for $150,000 came by way of the National Enquirer's publisher, American Media — to prevent both women from speaking about their alleged affairs with the Republican candidate. After pleading guilty to eight counts, Cohen faced a three-year federal prison sentence.

Cohen, once considered among the most loyal figures in Trump's inner circle, would go on to meet some 20 times with Manhattan prosecutors, culminating in early March with two afternoons of testimony before a special grand jury.

He told reporters that he answered personal questions from “each and every one” of the 23 Manhattan residents comprising the special grand jury.

In his 2018 guilty plea, Cohen admitted that the payoffs were “at the coordination with and the direction of Individual-1." The office of the presidency meanwhile imbued Trump with the power to pardon himself for any federal crime, and the Southern District of New York never brought criminal charges.

Trump has repeatedly denied any affair and insists the payments to Daniels and McDougal were a private matter that did not amount to campaign finance violations.

In recent weeks, various members of Trump's White House inner circle, including his former political adviser Kellyanne Conway and former spokeswoman Hope Hicks, were seen leaving the Manhattan DA's office.

The long-anticipated indictment comes as Trump is ramping up his 2024 campaign to regain the White House while simultaneously battling legal problems on multiple fronts, including a grand jury investigation by prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, into possible criminal efforts to overturn the state's ballot count during the 2020 election.

Earlier this month, Trump assured Republicans gathered outside Washington for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that no criminal indictment would derail his 2024 presidential campaign.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s 2024 campaign, denounced a possible indictment from New York prosecutors as a “sham” and politically partisan witch hunt, “brought on by George Soros-backed Radical Left Democrat prosecutor Alvin Bragg." George Soros, a Jewish philanthropist and Hungarian-American billionaire who funds pro-democracy activism across the globe, is a favorite target of far-right conspiracy theories.

“This is happening because President Trump is leading in the polls by a large margin against both Democrats and Republicans, and there’s never been anything so blatant in American political history,” Cheung said amid Trump's CPAC appearence.

Steve Bannon, who served as Trump's White House strategist, echoed the anti-Semitic conspiracy-tinged attack on the same prosecutors when Bragg’s office criminally charged him last year in connection with the We Build The Wall fundraiser fraud.

Lawyers for the former president said Trump declined an invitation to testify before the special grand jury. Such invitations often indicate a decision on indictments is near.

In addition to Tacopina, founding partner of Tacopina, Seigel & DeOre in New York City, Trump has retained New York attorney Susan Necheles to lead his defense in the criminal case.

Necheles represented the Trump Corporation last year during the Manhattan district attorney’s trial against the Trump Organization, which resulted in jury convictions on all counts and a guilty plea from longtime Trump Org finance chief Allen Weisselberg.

“For five years the Manhattan District Attorney’s office has investigated every facet of former President Trump‘s life,” Necheles said in a statement earlier this month. “Unable to find criminality in any aspect of his finances, the Manhattan District Attorney now threatens to indict former President Trump for payments made to Stormy Daniels seven years ago.  For the DA’s office to charge former President Trump, a victim of extortion, with a crime because his then lawyer, Michael Cohen, a convicted liar, paid the extortionist would be unprecedented and outrageous selective prosecution.”

Trump recently retained Tacopina to joint his defense team in a pair of civil cases against the former “Apprentice” star brought by famed New York columnist E. Jean Carroll, who alleges Trump raped her in a dressing room at the department store Bergdorf Goodman some time in the 1990s.

Before the charges were announced, Tacopina made a series of television appearances, denying any wrongdoing for the hush-money payments and characterizing Trump as the victim of both an extortion scheme and a political witch hunt.

“I believe this will catapult him into the White House,” he told Ari Melber on MSNBC’s "The Beat."

Mark Pomerantz, a former mafia prosecutor hired to lead the DA’s probe, repeatedly described the hush-money probe in his book “People vs Donald Trump: an Inside Account,” as a “zombie case” that returned from the dead after investigators had moved on.

The abrupt resignations of Pomerantz and fellow top prosecutor Carey Dunne from the investigation in February 2022 threw the future of the probe into question.

Both started on the probe under former District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and were asked to stay when Bragg took office in January.

The New York Times reported that Dunne and Pomerantz quit after Bragg raised doubts about pursuing a case against Trump, prompting Bragg to issue a rare public statement affirming his office’s commitment to the ongoing investigation.

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This story is developing and will be updated.

Ahead of the July 1. 2021, arraignment of the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, a spectator costumed as former President Donald Trump in an orange prison jumpsuit waves outside of Manhattan Supreme Court. (Nina Pullano/Courthouse News Service) 

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