Trump Indicted by New York Grand Jury Over Hush Money

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rollingstone.com

 

Trump Indicted by New York Grand Jury Over Hush Money

Tim Dickinson

7–9 minutes

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Trump Indicted

A Manhattan grand jury has made Trump the first former president in American history to face criminal charges

Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2019. JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump on charges related to the former president’s hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, Rolling Stone has confirmed. The New York Times was the first to report the news.

The historic indictment, was highly anticipated, as details of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s probe into the former president became public in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, Bragg’s office gave Trump the option to testify before the grand jury, signaling an indictment was forthcoming. Trump declined the invitation. Fox News reported that Manhattan prosecutors had requested a meeting with law enforcement to discuss logistics surrounding the possible indictment, and Trump posted to Truth Social the following morning that he would be getting arrested in the coming days. 

The indictment is unprecedented. Trump is the first former president to face criminal prosecution in the history of the United States. (Though culpability was not in doubt, Richard Nixon was pardoned for his Watergate crimes before he could face the justice system.) 

The vote is a gut-check for the American legal system, testing the bedrock principle that “no one is above the law.”

The indictment stem from a 2016 payment to Daniels, with whom Trump allegedly had an affair in 2006 and 2007. The pair had met at a celebrity golf tournament near Lake Tahoe during the height of Trump’s celebrity as the star of the reality show The Apprentice.

In October of 2016, shortly before the general election, Trump’s then-attorney and fixer Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to sign a non-disclosure-agreement, to stop her from dishing details of the alleged tryst to the press. The motive was to prevent a new sexual scandal from rocking the late stages of a campaign that was still cleaning up from the fallout of the Access Hollywood tape. Despite the explicit aim of helping Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, the payment was not disclosed as a campaign contribution. 

Cohen made the hush money payment from his own finances — securing a home equity line of credit to come up with the cash — and funneled the payoff through a shell corporation. Trump then allegedly directed that Cohen be reimbursed for the payment, and also rewarded the fixer handsomely for the hassle. But Trump didn’t cut Cohen a check. The funds, totaling more than $400,000, were paid out from the coffers of his business, the Trump Organization, which put Cohen on a $35,000 monthly retainer throughout 2017, ostensibly for legal services, according to Cohen’s guilty plea for violating campaign finance laws.  

Trump has denied the affair and has insisted that he never instructed Cohen to do anything illegal. He has pointed to Cohen as his attorney and suggested he was acting on the advice of counsel. Cohen has testified that the initial payment and the covert reimbursement scheme were both executed at Trump’s direction.

Some observers have argued that the criminal case against Trump lack gravitas and that the salacious nature of the Stormy Daniels scandal makes it a poor test-case for the serious and unprecedented business of seeking a criminal conviction of a former president. Trump and his allies have decried the prosecution as corrupt and partisan, pointing to Bragg having won office thanks in part to financial support provided by the liberal financier George Soros.  

But it’s equally true that the indictment in New York could open the floodgates, emboldening other criminal prosecutors to follow suit with charges relating to more serious crimes. Trump remains under investigation in Georgia for allegations of 2020 election interference, and the federal Justice Department has appointed a special prosecutor to probe his mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as well as his campaign to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, which resulted in a criminal referral by the House committee that investigated Jan. 6.