The exact charges against Trump are not yet known, as the indictment is being kept under wraps until his initial court appearance in New York. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sought the indictment, and Trump's lawyers were notified shortly after the grand jury's decision. They released a statement saying that Trump did not commit any crime and that they would fight the charges in court.
In response to the news, Trump released a statement claiming that the indictment was an act of blatant election interference by Democrats and that he is innocent. The case brought by Bragg is not a sure bet, as federal prosecutors and Cyrus Vance Jr., Bragg's predecessor, had previously passed on charging Trump in a stand-alone case related to the hush money.
The state case in New York is unlikely to affect Trump's presidential candidacy, even if he is ultimately convicted, as there is no constitutional requirement for candidates to have a clean record, and states are barred from imposing their own restrictions on presidential candidates. The indictment could impact Trump politically, as it may make some voters more likely to support another candidate, while also serving as a rallying point for Trump's supporters, who view the charges as unfair.
The hush-money investigation, which was triggered by a series of Wall Street Journal articles in 2018, was the longest-running of several criminal probes into Trump. Other investigations are ongoing, including the Justice Department's investigation into the handling of classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss. The stakes in these investigations are higher, as they involve more serious alleged conduct with greater potential penalties.
In spite of potential criminal charges, Mr. Trump has stated that he will continue to run for president. This decision is motivated by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel's opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. However, the legal trouble that Mr. Trump's former fixer, Mr. Cohen, has faced could make him a challenging witness for a jury to trust. Nonetheless, there is circumstantial evidence supporting his account of Mr. Trump's involvement in the hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Federal investigators obtained phone records showing that Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen spoke twice before Mr. Cohen made arrangements to wire money to Ms. Daniels' attorney in October 2016. Additionally, Mr. Trump's allies in the tabloid world alerted Mr. Cohen to the threat of Ms. Daniels' story becoming public earlier that month, according to search warrant applications unsealed in Mr. Cohen's federal case.
In 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to making an excessive campaign contribution to Mr. Trump by buying Ms. Daniels' silence. This payment was the legal equivalent of Mr. Cohen donating $130,000 - far more than federal law allows - to Mr. Trump's campaign directly, according to federal prosecutors. Starting in 2017, Mr. Trump and his trust cut monthly checks to Mr. Cohen to reimburse him for the payment to Ms. Daniels. However, federal prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization falsely booked the checks as payment for legal services that Mr. Cohen never provided, hiding their true purpose. Mr. Cohen testified in Congress in 2019 that Mr. Trump personally approved the plan.
Mr. Cohen also pleaded guilty in 2018 to a campaign-finance crime involving a payment to a former Playboy model who said she had a 10-month affair with Mr. Trump. The National Enquirer's publisher, American Media Inc., bought Karen McDougal's story for $150,000 in August 2016 to prevent her from telling it elsewhere, a practice known as "catch and kill." Later, American Media Inc. admitted to federal prosecutors that it coordinated the payment with Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump, who denies the affair. The Journal was the first to reveal the payment to Ms. McDougal in November 2016.
Mr. Bragg's prosecutors have extensively questioned grand-jury witnesses about the deal with Ms. McDougal. The grand jury testimony of David Pecker, the former CEO of American Media, has linked Mr. Trump directly to the payment to Ms. McDougal and to an alleged broader scheme to suppress negative stories about Mr. Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
While the main facts of the hush-money scheme have been known for years and received scrutiny from federal prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office and state prosecutors under Mr. Bragg's predecessor, Mr. Vance, Mr. Vance's office examined the matter in 2018 but paused its inquiry until 2019 when federal prosecutors said they had wrapped up their campaign-finance probe. "We had been asked to stand down in our investigation by the U.S. attorney because it overlapped with what they were looking into," Mr. Vance said. "After Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty, we were surprised that the investigation didn't go further." When they resumed the investigation in 2019, Mr. Vance's prosecutors looked at charging Mr. Trump with falsifying business records to hide the true purpose of checks sent to Mr. Cohen as reimbursement for the Daniels payment, according to the book "People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account" by Mark Pomerantz, a former special assistant district attorney under Mr. Vance.
According to Mr. Pomerantz, a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney's office, the charge against Donald Trump related to the payment to Stormy Daniels was a misdemeanor. The charge could only be turned into a felony if the prosecutors could prove that the records were falsified to commit or conceal another crime. They considered a theory that the false invoices concealed a federal campaign-finance crime related to the payment to Ms. Daniels, but no New York court had ever formally approved that legal theory. Mr. Vance, the district attorney at the time, believed that a stand-alone felony case against Mr. Trump tied to the payment to Ms. Daniels would be too risky and abandoned it. Instead, they focused on allegations that Mr. Trump inflated the value of his assets on financial statements he provided to lenders and others.
When Alvin Bragg succeeded Mr. Vance in 2022, he decided against moving forward with a case based on Mr. Trump’s financial statements, saying that it wasn't ready. This caused Mr. Pomerantz and another senior prosecutor to resign from the office. About a year later, Mr. Bragg’s office began presenting evidence to a grand jury about the payment to Ms. Daniels and the way in which Mr. Trump and his company reimbursed Michael Cohen, who had tapped his own line of credit for the hush-money deal, according to people familiar with the investigation.
The hush-money inquiry has been abandoned and revived so often over the years that prosecutors have referred to it as the “zombie case”. Mr. Trump has used the investigation's ebbs and flows to cast doubt on Mr. Bragg’s motives, saying that prosecutors have rejected the case in the past. Mr. Trump has signaled possible defenses in social-media posts, claiming that he relied on Mr. Cohen's counsel and that he was a victim of extortion by Ms. Daniels. Prosecutors could argue that the alleged conduct is not too old because Mr. Trump lived out of state much of the past six years, pausing the statute of limitations. New York extended the time allowed to bring charges during the pandemic.
