Elections

Mr. Cohen, Donald J. Trump’s former fixer, is the key witness in a case built around a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.Michael D. Cohen, the former fixer who for years did Donald J. Trump’s dirty work, is expected to testify before a Manhattan grand jury next week, a sign that prosecutors are poised to indict the former president for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to people with knowledge of the matter.The Manhattan district attorney’s office has already questioned at least seven other people before the grand jury hearing evidence about the hush money deal, according to several other people with knowledge of the inquiry, potentially making Mr. Cohen the last witness.Once he has testified, nearly every crucial player in the hush money matter will have appeared before the grand jury — with the exception of the porn star herself, Stormy Daniels, who may not be called to testify.It would be highly unusual for a prosecutor in a high-profile white-collar case to go through a weekslong presentation of evidence — and question nearly every relevant witness — without intending to seek an indictment.Mr. Cohen’s testimony is the second strong indication that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, will ask the grand jury to indict the former president, possibly as soon as this month. The first came when Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors informed Mr. Trump’s lawyers that if he wanted to testify before the grand jury, he could do so next week, people with knowledge of the matter said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close.In New York, potential defendants have the right to answer questions in the grand jury shortly before they are indicted, but they rarely testify, and Mr. Trump is likely to decline the offer.A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment. Reached for comment, Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny J. Davis, said that “I’m only allowed to say that we’re cooperating with the investigation.” He added, “We appreciate the professionalism of Mr. Bragg’s team.”Mr. Bragg’s investigation concerns a $130,000 payment that Mr. Cohen made in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign to Ms. Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. After taking office, Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen, who has long said that he was acting on his boss’s orders to silence Ms. Daniels.The prosecutors have zeroed in on whether Mr. Trump and his company falsified internal records to hide the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen — and Ms. Daniels’s story — from the voting public.Mr. Trump has consistently derided the investigation as a partisan “witch hunt” engineered by his political enemies and has called Mr. Bragg, a Democrat who is Black, “racist.”On Thursday, in a lengthy, unrestrained statement on Truth Social, Mr. Trump denied having an affair with Ms. Daniels and insulted her appearance while painting the investigation as part of a conspiracy to keep him from returning to the White House. He and his followers, he wrote, are “victims of this corrupt, depraved, and weaponized justice system.”Any case charging a former president would be unprecedented and, with Mr. Trump running for a third time, could roil the 2024 presidential primary campaign in ways that are hard to predict. Already, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors have come closer to indicting Mr. Trump than any of the others who have pursued him over the years.Yet an indictment is not assured. Mr. Bragg could delay or opt against seeking charges, and Mr. Cohen’s testimony could influence that decision.Even if Mr. Trump is indicted, convicting him or sending him to prison is no sure bet, and bringing charges would represent a significant gamble for Mr. Bragg. The case against the former president hinges on a risky legal theory involving two different bodies of law, and if Mr. Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.Mr. Trump’s lawyers will also undoubtedly take aim at the prosecution’s star witness, Mr. Cohen, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money as well as accusations that he lied to Congress about a potential Trump hotel deal in Moscow. The defense lawyers could use his guilty pleas as ammunition to attack his credibility as a witness and argue that he has an ax to grind against Mr. Trump.But prosecutors might counter that Mr. Cohen was convicted of lying on behalf of Mr. Trump and that he is best positioned to explain the former president’s involvement in the hush money saga to jurors. Mr. Cohen’s testimony could illuminate that sequence of events, providing prosecutors the firsthand account they would need to make a case against Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has also provided documents to prosecutors, the people familiar with the matter said.An appearance on the stand would not be his first test in a high-pressure setting: In February 2019, Mr. Cohen testified for hours in a public hearing held by the House Oversight Committee, brushing back repeated attacks from Mr. Trump’s Republican allies as he described how Mr. Trump makes his desires known.“He speaks in a code,” Mr. Cohen said during the hearing. “And I understand the code because I’ve been around him for a decade.”Mr. Cohen’s payout to Ms. Daniels came in October 2016, after Ms. Daniels’s representatives contacted the National Enquirer to offer exclusive rights to her story about an affair with Mr. Trump. David Pecker and Dylan Howard, two of the tabloid’s leaders, helped broker a deal between Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, Keith Davidson.The day before Mr. Cohen wired the $130,000, he spoke by phone twice with Mr. Trump, according to records in the federal case. They spoke again the day after the payment.Mr. Trump repaid him in monthly installments over the course of the following year. While president, he personally signed several of the checks.In Mr. Cohen’s federal case, prosecutors said that Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, “falsely accounted” for the reimbursement payments as legal expenses and that company records cited a phony retainer agreement with Mr. Cohen. Mr. Cohen was a lawyer, but there was no such retainer agreement and the reimbursement was unrelated to any legal services.When Mr. Cohen was asked during congressional testimony why Mr. Trump’s company spread out the reimbursements over many months, he explained, “That was in order to hide what the payment was,” adding that it was done “so that it would look like a retainer.” Asked whether Mr. Trump knew, Mr. Cohen replied, “Oh, he knew about everything, yes.”Now, those false reimbursement records are at the heart of the potential criminal case against Mr. Trump.In New York, it can be a crime to falsify business records, but it amounts to a misdemeanor. To elevate it to a felony, prosecutors would need show that Mr. Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime.Alvin L. Bragg, who was criticized for calling off an earlier grand jury presentation, would be the first American prosecutor to indict a former president.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesIn this case, that second crime could be a violation of election law. Like the federal prosecutors who charged Mr. Cohen, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors will likely argue that the payment to Ms. Daniels was an illegal contribution to Mr. Trump’s campaign, given that the money silenced the porn star and, thus, benefited his candidacy.Combining the false records charge with the election violation would constitute a novel legal theory, raising the possibility that a judge or appellate court could throw out the case. Mr. Cohen for years has pointed the finger at Mr. Trump, saying that his boss directed him to pay Ms. Daniels, an accusation that was supported by federal prosecutors in the case against Mr. Cohen.But Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors may have to rely on Mr. Cohen in linking Mr. Trump to the false reimbursement records. Mr. Cohen wrote in his memoir that he worked out the monthly repayment plan after the election with Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg.Mr. Weisselberg is not expected to testify before the grand jury; he is serving a sentence in the Rikers Island jail complex after pleading guilty to unrelated tax fraud charges in a case that also led to the Trump Organization’s conviction last year.Since Mr. Bragg impaneled the grand jury in January, it has heard testimony from Mr. Pecker, Mr. Howard and Mr. Davidson. The jurors have also heard testimony from two employees of the Trump Organization, as well as Kellyanne Conway, who managed the final months of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.This is not the first Manhattan grand jury to hear evidence about Mr. Trump. Before leaving office at the end of 2021, Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had directed prosecutors to begin presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury. But after taking office last year, Mr. Bragg and some of his prosecutors grew concerned about the strength of that case, which was focused on the former president’s business practices. He halted the presentation, prompting two senior prosecutors leading the investigation to resign.That portion of the investigation is continuing, people with knowledge of the matter said.But over the past several months, Mr. Bragg has focused on the hush money, the initial impetus for the investigation when it opened in 2018.Mr. Cohen has faithfully tracked his meetings with the district attorney’s office over the years, and on Tuesday noted that he had met with prosecutors to discuss Mr. Trump 19 times to date.“He needs to be held accountable if in fact there’s something that he did wrong,” Mr. Cohen said outside the district attorney’s office on one of his final visits.Kate Christobek More

Sara Carpenter yelled at, pushed against and slapped the arms of police officers, all while wielding a tambourine, prosecutors said.A former New York City police officer was convicted this week of several crimes for her role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, during which, prosecutors said, she pushed against and slapped the arms of police officers, all while yelling and wielding a tambourine.A federal jury in Washington, D.C., found the retired officer, Sara Carpenter, guilty Thursday on seven felony and misdemeanor charges that included civil disorder, obstruction of official proceeding and entering or remaining in a restricted building or ground, according to court records.Ms. Carpenter, 53, is among about 1,000 people to be charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, prosecutors said. She and other supporters of former President Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol that day in a bid to disrupt the certification of President Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. The first person to be convicted, Guy Wesley Reffitt, was found guilty last March of obstructing Congress’s certification of the election results and other crimes.Security footage captured Ms. Carpenter, left, wielding a tambourine inside the Capitol. Department of JusticeMs. Carpenter was charged after security cameras captured her confronting a phalanx of officers as they guarded a hallway leading to the U.S. Senate chambers, prosecutors said. Despite having been told to leave the premises, she stayed for a half-hour, prosecutors said.At one point, prosecutors said, she could be heard yelling at the officers, “I’m an animal,” with a common vulgarity added for emphasis.When she finally left the building, prosecutors said, she was recorded on video saying: “The breach was made. It needs to calm down now. Congress needs to come out. They need to certify Trump as president. This is our house.”A lawyer for Ms. Carpenter, Michelle Gelernt, declined to comment on Friday. The New York Police Department did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Ms. Carpenter’s service as an officer. Ms. Carpenter is to be sentenced on July 14.About a day after the attack on the Capitol, the F.B.I. received an anonymous tip that Ms. Carpenter had called a relative and told that person that she had made it inside the Capitol and had been hit with tear gas, according to a criminal complaint. She was interviewed by federal officers about a week and a half later, on Jan. 18, the complaint says.Ms. Carpenter told investigators that she had left her home in New York and driven to Washington “on or about” the evening of Jan. 5, 2021, the complaint says. An E-ZPass tag attached to her vehicle confirmed that she had made the trip between 12 a.m. and 4 a.m. on Jan. 6, the complaint says.Once she got to Washington, Ms. Carpenter told investigators, she monitored Mr. Trump’s tweets to find out where to meet for the rally he had scheduled for Jan. 6 and then joined a large crowd of his supporters as it descended on the Capitol.Ms. Carpenter said that “she observed police yelling for individuals to get out, then pushing and shoving the crowd,” according to the complaint. She also told investigators that she had been trampled and pepper-sprayed.Using video that Ms. Carpenter provided and security camera footage from the building, investigators were able to track her movements through the Capitol. She also voluntarily turned over the tambourine she said she had carried inside the Capitol, the complaint says.Another former New York City police officer, Thomas Webster, was convicted last May for his role in the riot on charges that included assault. In September, Mr. Webster, who swung a metal flagpole at a Washington officer during the riot, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. More

Mr. Lineker, one of England’s best-known sports personalities, had accused the British home secretary of using language reminiscent of Nazi Germany to promote a plan to stop asylum seekers.One of the premier soccer programs on British television was thrown into turmoil on Friday after the BBC suspended its host, the former English soccer star Gary Lineker, over comments he made criticizing the Conservative government’s plan to stop asylum seekers who arrive on boats across the English Channel.Mr. Lineker, a former captain of England’s national soccer team and the top goal scorer at the 1986 World Cup, ignited a firestorm on the political right after he suggested on Tuesday that the British home secretary, Suella Braverman, was using language reminiscent of Nazi Germany to promote the plan.After several days of debate played out on social media, in the pages of British newspapers and in the halls of Parliament, the BBC said on Friday that Mr. Lineker’s social media activity was “a breach of our guidelines,” and that he had been suspended from hosting “Match of the Day,” a mainstay of the BBC’s schedule since 1964.“The BBC has decided that he will step back from presenting ‘Match of the Day’ until we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media,” the British Broadcasting Corporation said in a statement.“When it comes to leading our football and sports coverage, Gary is second to none,” the statement said. “We have never said that Gary should be an opinion-free zone, or that he can’t have a view on issues that matter to him, but we have said that he should keep well away from taking sides on party political issues or political controversies.”Soon after the BBC issued the statement, two others who host “Match of the Day” with Mr. Lineker, Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, said that they would not appear on the show on Saturday.“Everybody knows what Match of the Day means to me, but I’ve told the BBC I won’t be doing it tomorrow,” Mr. Wright wrote on Twitter. “Solidarity.”Mr. Shearer wrote, “I have informed the BBC that I won’t be appearing on MOTD tomorrow night.”The BBC reported that the program would still be broadcast on Saturday, without hosts. Saturday’s “Match of the Day” will “focus on match action without studio presentation or punditry,” a BBC spokesman was quoted as saying by the BBC.The program, which features highlights from Saturday’s Premier League games, usually draws millions of viewers, according to the BBC.Mr. Lineker, who first appeared on “Match of the Day” as a presenter in 1999, signed a five-year contract in 2020 to remain with the BBC until 2025.After parlaying his hugely successful soccer career into a career as one of Britain’s best-known sports personalities, Mr. Lineker has frequently engaged in debates on social media, most prominently when he supported the campaign for Britain to remain inside the European Union.His comments have sometimes led to criticism from the right and accusations that he is violating the BBC’s guidelines on impartiality.Such was the case with his comments on the government’s plan to stop asylum seekers.Mr. Lineker had responded on Twitter to a video that the Home Office had posted in which Ms. Braverman promoted legislation that would give the office a “duty” to remove nearly all asylum seekers who arrive on boats across the English Channel, even though many are fleeing war and persecution.“Enough is enough,” Ms. Braverman declares. “We must stop the boats.”Mr. Lineker responded with sharp criticism.“This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?” he wrote.The comments were roundly rejected by Ms. Braverman and others on the right, and they set off a debate about the BBC’s impartiality and the comparison to Nazi Germany.“It diminishes the unspeakable tragedy that millions of people went through, and I don’t think anything that is happening in the U.K. today can come close to what happened in the Holocaust,” Ms. Braverman said in an interview this week with the BBC. “So I find it a lazy and unhelpful comparison to make.”In The Daily Telegraph, the journalist Charles Moore accused Mr. Lineker of being “the most famous exemplar of the power of the BBC’s ‘talent’ to trash its impartiality.”“He expresses not the voice of the concerned citizen, but the arrogance of a man of power,” Mr. Moore wrote. “He is the big player who thinks he can defy the ref. The reputation of the entire BBC and its director-general depends on telling him he cannot.”On the political left, others defended Mr. Lineker and expressed dismay that the BBC had pulled him from “Match of the Day.”“This feels like an over reaction brought on by a right-wing media frenzy obsessed with undermining the BBC,” Lucy Powell, a member of Parliament from the Labour and Cooperative Party, wrote on Twitter. More

ADIYAMAN, Turkey — Beneath each fresh mound in this rapidly expanding graveyard lies a tragedy. One morning at dawn, Zeki Karababa told me about his.Karababa’s brother, Hamit; Hamit’s wife, Fatma; and two children, Ahmet, 10, and Evra, 3, had been crushed when their apartment building crumbled in the earthquake.But that was just the beginning.“For three days there were no professional rescuers,” Karababa told me. By the time they found his relatives, all four were dead.“I took the bodies with my bare hands,” he said, weeping. “Nobody came to help us.”It is a refrain I heard over and over in the week I spent traversing southeastern Turkey last month. The country is struggling to recover from an earthquake whose wrath defies superlatives: 50,000 dead in Turkey and Syria and countless families homeless. The World Bank estimates that the quake caused $34.2 billion in physical damage in Turkey, or roughly 4 percent of the country’s G.D.P.Turkey’s government, led by the increasingly autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has tried to portray the unbearable losses as the inevitable result of a biblical catastrophe that no one could have prepared for. But few people I spoke to were buying that.“There is nothing natural about this disaster,” Ali Aslan, a volunteer rescue worker in Adiyaman, told me. “The state failed these people. They didn’t have to die like this.”In all of the death and destruction, nothing has been shaken more thoroughly than the Turkish people’s faith in their government. The quake has undermined Erdogan’s strongman image and exposed the core contradiction of autocratic rule: A government that insists on its own omnipotence and competence will inevitably disappoint when it is nowhere to be seen in the face of disaster. The implicit trade — freedom for safety and security — begins to look like a very bad bargain indeed.This is not the first time the Turkish people have had to confront this reality. For generations, Turkish citizens had been told that the government — “devlet baba,” or father state — would keep them safe. Few people have gotten more out of this promise than Erdogan. He rose to power in the aftermath of Turkey’s last devastating earthquake, which hit near Istanbul in 1999 and killed more than 17,000 people. Just as they did last month, victims lay under the rubble for days awaiting rescue from a government that showed up too late or not at all.“I am not saying that the civil defense organization collapsed,” a Turkish lawmaker said at the time. “It did not exist. I saw that there was not the slightest bit of preparation.”Survivors of the earthquake stand in line to get aid at a distribution point in Adiyaman.Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesThe government response was “a declaration of bankruptcy for the Turkish political and economic system,” a cabinet member declared in a speech. “All ideological arguments were flattened by the earthquake,” he said. “Lying under the ruins is the Turkish political and administrative system.”The state’s compact with the Turkish people had been broken. The disastrous response was seen by many as a result of the corrupt governance and decadent indifference of the elite, and it led to the eventual defeat of the secular, nationalist establishment that had held power in Ankara since the founding of the Turkish state. Erdogan had been Istanbul’s mayor and was a loud critic of the government at the time. His new political party, the Justice and Development Party, took power, led by pious business owners who said they wanted to improve the lot of the average citizen, not line their own pockets.But more than 20 years have passed, and now the tables have turned. If it took roughly eight decades for the old elite to wear out their welcome with corruption and overreach, Erdogan and his party have achieved the same ignominy in two.“In any modern setting, when something bad happens to you, you expect the state to show up,” said Selim Koru, a leading analyst of Turkish affairs. “Somebody is supposed to answer the call. And when that doesn’t happen, people just get very, very upset.”There are lots of very angry people in Turkey right now. “Lies, lies and more lies, it has been 20 years, resign,” Turkish football fans recently shouted.It wasn’t supposed to be this way.Erdogan and his party came to power promising good governance and public safety in the aftermath of the Istanbul quake. His government embarked on a frenzy of building, and construction supercharged the Turkish economy. Per capita G.D.P. nearly tripled between 2003 and its peak in 2013. In just about every city, towers of apartment blocks mushroomed. Cranes dotted the skylines.But many of those buildings held deadly secrets that only now have spilled out. Idris Bedirhanoglu, a professor of civil engineering at Dicle University in southern Turkey, explained to me how contractors routinely cut corners and the government let them get away with it. They might skimp on cement or substitute smooth river stones for commercially made crushed gravel, making for a weaker aggregate. A builder might put in thinner rebar.In 2018 Erdogan extended what was known as “zoning amnesty” to buildings that did not meet stringent code requirements. The action was intended as an election year sop to voters who had expanded their homes and businesses illegally, and he touted this in remarks he gave in the city of Kahramanmaras. That city would be one of the hardest hit by this year’s earthquake.What’s left of an area in Hatay, Turkey, after the quake.Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesErdogan’s rise to power after the 1999 Istanbul disaster was paralleled by a surge in civic activity. Many people felt abandoned by a paternalistic government. Turkish intellectuals and activists formed and bolstered their own civil society organizations aimed at helping one another through all manner of difficulties. A lot of the organizing was done by professional associations of architects and engineers and others worried about not just building safety but also the use of public space and the environmental impacts of the building frenzy that accompanied Erdogan’s rise. These groups did not want a new, paternalistic state to take the place of the old one. They wanted greater participation in a truly democratic civic sphere.In Erdogan’s first decade in power, he was broadly hailed as a champion of openness and democracy. Turkey was seeking European Union membership and burnishing its democratic credentials. Erdogan emphasized freedom of religion, which had been repressed in the old secular regime, and freedom of expression. Most critically, he managed to contain Turkey’s military and all but eliminate its meddling in political life.But ultimately Erdogan began refashioning the old centralized state as an even more powerful instrument that he alone could wield. Over the past decade, and with increasing speed since a 2016 coup plot was put down, Erdogan has squeezed civil society groups, brought the independent press to heel and prosecuted his political opponents. He has steadily accrued power, culminating in a 2017 referendum that moved Turkey from a parliamentary system to a strong executive system, giving him greater control over the judiciary and legislature.He centralized disaster relief under a new government agency known as AFAD, and in a decision that calls to mind George W. Bush’s appointment of the head of the International Arabian Horse Association to lead FEMA two years before Hurricane Katrina, Erdogan named a theologian with little experience in disaster relief to head AFAD’s relief efforts, according to local media reports.Erdogan has joined a growing club of elected autocrats who came to power in truly democratic elections only to slowly insulate themselves from political competition. For such men there is no need to declare oneself the leader for life — it is much better to follow the frog-in-boiling-water approach. Bit by bit, destroy the independence of institutions, civil society, the media. Drain the legislature of its oversight power. Bend the judiciary to your will. Use the law to remove popular competitors from the playing field of politics. Slowly, then all at once, you are the only person who can win an election.Zeki Karababa mourns the death of his brother Hamit and Hamit’s wife and children, all killed when their apartment building collapsed in the earthquake.Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York TimesIt is happening in India and in Hungary, and many feared that Brazil was headed in this direction, until the last election. The natural end point of this process — unfettered one-man rule despite regular elections — is on display most tragically in Russia, where a madman who answers to no one controls what is reportedly the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. But Civicus, an organization that tracks the health of civil society across the globe, gives Turkey the same rating as Russia: repressed.In the concentration of this power, however, lie the seeds of destruction. If the president controls all the levers of power, who else can he blame when the response to a disaster goes awry? In a world where we expect more disasters, not fewer, this is an extraordinary vulnerability.“To build his strongman rule he weakened institutions, and those weak institutions came back to haunt him,” said Gonul Tol, director of the Turkey program at the Middle East Institute. “It really undermined his ability to govern and deliver.”It would be foolish to try to predict with any certainty how the earthquake and its aftermath will affect Erdogan’s political fortunes. The country needs rebuilding, and Erdogan is nothing if not a committed builder. Dueling polls disagree about whether his popularity has dipped since the quake.Erdogan also has lots of friends on the global stage. His handling of the cataclysm on his doorstep in Syria, which could easily have undone a less savvy leader, has raised Turkey’s stature, making him ever more indispensable in a new, multipolar world. Turkey is a NATO member that nevertheless has warming ties with Russia, making it a crucial and sometimes frustrating player in the Ukraine crisis.But as Erdogan well knows, disaster changes the trajectory of history in sudden and unexpected ways. The country is in the midst of an economic crisis, in part driven by Erdogan’s highly unorthodox policy of keeping interest rates low despite inflation soaring at one point beyond 85 percent. A poll before the earthquake found that more than 70 percent of young Turks want to leave the country, and that percentage is certain to rise. Even before the quake, Erdogan’s poll numbers were slipping.Meanwhile, the fractured Turkish opposition has become more united. New polling numbers reported this week show a double-digit lead for the opposition candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. He has pledged to return the country to its parliamentary system and decentralize power.Last week, Erdogan indicated that elections would happen on schedule. Right now, Turkey simmers with grief and rage. The last time there was a massive quake, that grief and rage were channeled into the possibility of a new compact between citizen and state in Turkey and a rejection of the centralized, autocratic style of the previous regime. If Erdogan and his party, despite a promising start, have crushed that dream, the elections in May, assuming they are allowed to proceed freely and fairly, could offer another rare chance for the Turkish people to try again.“I think this is the last exit for Turkish democracy,” Gonul Tol said. “The stakes are really high.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

A case against the former president — who is also a current presidential candidate — poses challenges for prosecutors. Here’s why.The revelation that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has indicated to Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that he could soon face criminal charges marked a major development in an inquiry that has loomed over the former president for nearly five years.It also raised a number of questions about the contours of the potential case against Mr. Trump, who could become the first former American president to be indicted.Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney, is focused on Mr. Trump’s involvement in the payment of hush money to a porn star who said she had an affair with him. Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time, made the payment during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.While the facts are dramatic, the case against Mr. Trump would likely hinge on a complex interplay of laws. And a conviction is far from assured.Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about the longest running investigation into Mr. Trump:How did this all begin?Stormy Daniels during an event at a Washington, D.C. bookstore in December 2018.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesIn October 2016, during the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the porn star Stormy Daniels was trying to sell her story of an affair with Mr. Trump.At first, Ms. Daniels’s representatives contacted the National Enquirer to offer exclusive rights to her story. David Pecker, the tabloid’s publisher and a longtime ally of Mr. Trump, had agreed to look out for potentially damaging stories about him during the 2016 campaign, and at one point even agreed to buy the story of another woman’s affair with Mr. Trump and never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”But Mr. Pecker didn’t purchase Ms. Daniels’s story. Instead, he and the tabloid’s top editor, Dylan Howard, helped broker a separate deal between Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels’s lawyer.Mr. Cohen paid $130,000, and Mr. Trump later reimbursed him from the White House.In 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including federal campaign finance crimes involving the hush money. The payment, federal prosecutors concluded, amounted to an improper donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign.In the days after Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea, the district attorney’s office opened its own criminal investigation into the matter. While the federal prosecutors were focused on Mr. Cohen, the district attorney’s inquiry would center on Mr. Trump.So what did Mr. Trump possibly do wrong?Michael Cohen visited the Manhattan district attorney’s office for an interview on Tuesday.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesWhen pleading guilty in federal court, Mr. Cohen pointed the finger at his boss. It was Mr. Trump, he said, who directed him to pay off Ms. Daniels, a contention that prosecutors later corroborated.The prosecutors also raised questions about Mr. Trump’s monthly reimbursement checks to Mr. Cohen. They said in court papers that Mr. Trump’s company “falsely accounted” for the monthly payments as legal expenses and that company records cited a retainer agreement with Mr. Cohen. Although Mr. Cohen was a lawyer, and became Mr. Trump’s personal attorney after he took office, there was no such retainer agreement and the reimbursement was unrelated to any legal services Mr. Cohen performed.Mr. Cohen has said that Mr. Trump knew about the phony retainer agreement, an accusation that could form the basis of the case against the former president.In New York, falsifying business records can amount to a crime, albeit a misdemeanor. To elevate the crime to a felony charge, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors must show that Mr. Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime.In this case, that second crime could be a violation of New York State election law. While hush money is not inherently illegal, the prosecutors could argue that the $130,000 payout effectively became an improper donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, under the theory that it benefited his candidacy because it silenced Ms. Daniels.Will it be a tough case to prove?Even if Mr. Trump is indicted, convicting him or sending him to prison will be challenging. For one thing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers are sure to attack Mr. Cohen’s credibility by citing his criminal record.The case against the former president also likely hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws.Combining the falsifying business records charge with a violation of state election law would be a novel legal theory for any criminal case, let alone one against the former president, raising the possibility that a judge or appellate court could throw it out or reduce the felony charge to a misdemeanor.And even if the felony charge remains, it amounts to a low-level felony. If Mr. Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.How did prosecutors convey that charges are likely?Prosecutors in the district attorney’s office recently signaled to Mr. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges.They did this by offering Mr. Trump the chance to testify next week before the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the potential case, people with knowledge of the matter said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual for prosecutors to notify a potential defendant without ultimately seeking charges against him.In New York, potential defendants have the right to answer questions in the grand jury before they are indicted, but they rarely testify, and Mr. Trump is likely to decline the offer.Will Mr. Trump definitely be indicted?It is still possible that Mr. Trump will not face charges. Mr. Trump’s lawyers could meet privately with the prosecutors in hopes of fending off criminal charges.And although Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors have already questioned at least six other people before the grand jury, they have not completed their presentation of evidence. Mr. Cohen, for example, has yet to appear before the panel.The prosecutors will then need to present the charges to the grand jurors, who will vote on an indictment.Until then, Mr. Bragg could decide to pump the brakes. As of now, however, that seems unlikely.What has Mr. Trump said in his defense?Mr. Trump has referred to the investigation as a “witch hunt” against him that began before he became president, and has called Mr. Bragg, who is Black and a Democrat, a “racist” who is motivated by politics.In a statement released Thursday night on Mr. Trump’s social network, Truth Social, he reiterated those claims, and denied he had ever had an affair with Ms. Daniels. He noted that prosecutors from various offices — including Mr. Bragg’s predecessor — had investigated the matter and had never before charged him with a crime.He wrote that the potential indictment was an attempt to thwart his presidential campaign.“They cannot win at the voter booth, so they have to go to a tool that has never been used in such a way in our country, weaponized law enforcement,” Mr. Trump wrote. Former Justice Department officials have accused Mr. Trump of ordering them to act in ways that aided him politically when he was in office. More

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What used to be a once-a-decade redistricting fight between political parties is now in perpetual motion, and up to 29 seats in 14 states are already at risk of being redrawn.WASHINGTON — For just about all of the nation’s history, politicians would fight over redistricting for a short period after each once-a-decade census, then forget about congressional maps until the next reapportionment.Now, a string of lawsuits and in-the-works state referendums are poised to redefine the battles over state legislative and congressional lines and leave the country in a state of perpetual redistricting.The dynamic is an escalation of the scattered redistricting battles over the last decade. Not since 2012 and 2014 have all 50 states’ congressional lines remained constant for consecutive elections, a streak unlikely to be broken next year. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee estimates that up to 29 seats in 14 states could be redrawn based on lawsuits that have already been filed. Scores more seats could change if the Supreme Court rules later this year that state legislators have ultimate authority to draw the lines.To prepare for those fights, the party’s redistricting committee is changing its leadership for the first time since its formation in 2017. Kelly Burton, the committee’s president, is leaving to join its six-member board and is being replaced by John Bisognano, who has been executive director. Marina Jenkins, who has served as the committee’s litigation director, will succeed Mr. Bisognano as executive director.“People used to think about staff that worked on redistricting as redistricting cicadas that come out every 10 years,” Mr. Bisognano said in an interview Thursday. “We need to keep this movement alive and growing in order to continue to fight back against the gerrymandering that we see coming.”Mr. Bisognano, a 38-year-old Massachusetts native, worked as a clubhouse manager for the minor league baseball team that used to play in Pawtucket, R.I., before beginning his political career as an organizer on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. He later worked in the Obama White House and joined the Democratic redistricting committee shortly after it formed in 2017.Mr. Bisognano, the new president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, and Marina Jenkins, its new executive director.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe Democratic redistricting committee and its Republican counterpart, the National Republican Redistricting Trust, both emerged in 2017, as the two parties prepared for the redistricting cycle that would follow the 2020 census. That cycle was itself a shift from how redistricting business had been done before, when it was chiefly a concern of the Democratic and Republican National Committees. Both redistricting organizations are remaining intact for the 2020s, as the political and legal fights persist, and lines that in past decades would have been considered fixed are now subject to change.“It was something that the party committees used to do themselves — the D.N.C. and the R.N.C. both had it in-house for a long time,” said Adam Kincaid, the president and executive director of the Republican redistricting organization. “It was time for organizations to have a full-time eye on this versus just having one or two staff working on it part time.”Republicans, led by a super PAC run by Ed Gillespie, outflanked Democrats in 2010 to flip control of 20 state legislative chambers just before new congressional and state legislative districts were to be drawn. That gave Republicans a firm grip on the House that didn’t give way until 2018, when President Donald J. Trump alienated suburban voters who had previously voted for G.O.P. candidates.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Yielding to Conspiracy Theories: Five Republican-led states have severed ties with a bipartisan voting integrity group, one that has faced intensifying attacks from election deniers and right-wing media.Asian Americans: In the New York governor’s election last year, voters in Asian neighborhoods across New York City sharply increased their support for Republicans. The shift is part of a national trend.The MAGA-fication of a College: North Idaho College trustees vowed to root out the school administration’s “deep state.” A full-blown crisis followed, and the school’s accreditation is now at risk.Chicago Mayor’s Race: The mayoral runoff pits two Democrats against each other who are on opposite sides of the debate over crime and policing — a divide national Republicans hope to exploit.By then, Mr. Obama, along with his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., had created the Democratic redistricting organization in the waning days of his presidency. Mr. Holder will most likely head to Wisconsin this month to campaign for Janet Protasiewicz, the liberal state supreme court candidate there, while Mr. Obama is hosting a March fund-raiser for the committee that will have as a “special guest” Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker.“For the past six years, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee has done the hard work of redrawing and reinstating district maps to make them more fair,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Their work has meant the difference between victory and defeat, and our democracy is in stronger shape because of what they have accomplished.”Barack Obama helped create the Democratic redistricting organization in the waning days of his presidency.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe next movement on redistricting is likely to come in Ohio and North Carolina, where Republicans who control the state governments are poised to redraw congressional maps to give their party an added advantage. Texas lawmakers are also redrawing their maps.Democrats have challenged maps in four states — Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and Texas — for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits racial discrimination. Democrats have also filed a lawsuit in state courts in their effort to undo congressional maps in Florida and Utah.In New Mexico, Republicans are suing to overturn congressional district maps.And the outcome of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April will determine whether a Republican-drawn gerrymander of state legislative lines survives. Four other states — Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania — have state Supreme Court elections in the next five years that could shift the balance of power and change how district lines are drawn.In those five years, control of the Michigan court, on which liberals now hold a 4-3 majority, could change three times.“We started this project six years ago because American voters deserved fair maps that represent our diverse communities — and we needed a coordinated strategy to make that happen,” Mr. Holder said. “The threat to fair maps continues and so must N.D.R.C.’s work.”In addition to elections for governors, state Supreme Court justices and legislators, ballot referendums are another area that the national parties’ state legislative committees are targeting.Florida, Missouri and Oklahoma all have legislation pending that would make passing a voter-driven referendum harder. Republicans in South Dakota and several other states tried similar threshold increases last year, but voters rejected them.Mr. Bisognano said the Democratic redistricting committee would also keep a focus on maintaining the integrity of the 2030 census after Trump administration officials tried to meddle in the 2020 census in order to achieve a favorable outcome for Republicans.“It came and went very quickly, and Covid obviously had an interesting and significant impact on the census, but so did Donald Trump,” Mr. Bisognano said.The Supreme Court could also sharply increase the power that state legislators have over drawing congressional districts. However, justices hinted this week that they might duck making a ruling on the case, known as Moore v. Harper.Even without a major Supreme Court decision, just seven states have laws that forbid mid-decade congressional districting, leaving the others to draw new maps when state legislators desire. Six more states prohibit new state legislative lines to be drawn in between censuses.A Supreme Court ruling that state legislators have ultimate control over federal redistricting would remove any stability from the redistricting process, Mr. Bisognano said.“If you add on the reality that these folks could redraw their maps and have no checks and balances in any capacity, that’s a pretty grim prospect for the ability for citizens to have fair maps,” he said. More

The former president was told that he could appear before a Manhattan grand jury next week if he wishes to testify, a strong indication that an indictment could soon follow.The Manhattan district attorney’s office recently signaled to Donald J. Trump’s lawyers that he could face criminal charges for his role in the payment of hush money to a porn star, the strongest indication yet that prosecutors are nearing an indictment of the former president, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.The prosecutors offered Mr. Trump the chance to testify next week before the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the potential case, the people said. Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual for the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, to notify a potential defendant without ultimately seeking charges against him.In New York, potential defendants have the right to answer questions in the grand jury before they are indicted, but they rarely testify, and Mr. Trump is likely to decline the offer. His lawyers could also meet privately with the prosecutors in hopes of fending off criminal charges.Any case would mark the first indictment of a former American president, and could upend the 2024 presidential race in which Mr. Trump remains a leading contender. It would also elevate Mr. Bragg to the national stage, though not without risk, and a conviction in the complex case is far from assured.Mr. Trump has faced an array of criminal investigations and special counsel inquiries over the years but has never been charged with a crime, underscoring the gravity of Mr. Bragg’s inquiry.Mr. Bragg could become the first prosecutor to charge Mr. Trump, but he might not be the last.In Georgia, the Fulton County District Attorney is investigating whether Mr. Trump interfered in the 2020 election, and at the federal level, a special counsel is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, as well as his handling of classified documents.The Manhattan inquiry, which has spanned nearly five years, centers on a $130,000 payment to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump. The payment was made in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign by Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, who was later reimbursed by Mr. Trump from the White House.Mr. Cohen, who has long said that Mr. Trump directed him to pay Ms. Daniels to keep her quiet, is expected to testify in front of the grand jury, but has not yet done so.Michael Cohen, right, central to a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign, next to his lawyer Lanny J. Davis. Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesThe district attorney’s office has already questioned at least six other people before the grand jury, according to several other people with knowledge of the inquiry.Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors have not finished the grand jury presentation and he could still decide against seeking an indictment.Mr. Trump has previously said that the prosecutors are engaged in a “witch hunt” against him that began before he became president, and has called Mr. Bragg, a Democrat who is Black, a politically motivated “racist.”“The Manhattan District Attorney’s threat to indict President Trump is simply insane,” a spokesman for the former president said in a statement, adding: “It’s an embarrassment to the Democrat prosecutors, and it’s an embarrassment to New York City.”A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.Even if Mr. Trump is indicted, convicting him or sending him to prison will be challenging. The case against the former president hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws, all amounting to a low-level felony. If Mr. Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.Mr. Trump’s lawyers are also sure to attack Mr. Cohen, who in 2018 pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money.The $130,000 payout came when Ms. Daniels’s representatives contacted the National Enquirer to offer exclusive rights to her story about an affair with Mr. Trump. David Pecker, the tabloid’s publisher and a longtime ally of Mr. Trump, had agreed to look out for potentially damaging stories about him during the 2016 campaign, and at one point even agreed to buy the story of another woman’s affair with Mr. Trump and never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”But Mr. Pecker didn’t bite at Ms. Daniels’s story. Instead, he and the tabloid’s top editor, Dylan Howard, helped broker a separate deal between Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels’s lawyer. Mr. Trump later reimbursed Mr. Cohen through monthly checks.In the federal case against Mr. Cohen, prosecutors said that Mr. Trump’s company “falsely accounted” for the monthly payments as legal expenses and that company records cited a retainer agreement with Mr. Cohen. Although Mr. Cohen was a lawyer, and became Mr. Trump’s personal attorney after he took office, there was no such retainer agreement and the reimbursement was unrelated to any legal services Mr. Cohen performed.In New York, falsifying business records can amount to a crime, albeit a misdemeanor. To elevate the crime to a felony charge, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors must show that Mr. Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an intent to commit or conceal a second crime.Alvin L. Bragg, who was criticized for calling off an earlier grand jury presentation, would be the first American prosecutor to indict a former president.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesIn this case, that second crime could be a violation of New York State election law. While hush money is not inherently illegal, the prosecutors could argue that the $130,000 payout effectively became an improper donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, under the theory that because the money silenced Ms. Daniels, it benefited his candidacy.Combining the criminal charge with a violation of state election law would be a novel legal theory for any criminal case, let alone one against the former president, raising the possibility that a judge or appellate court could throw it out or reduce the felony charge to a misdemeanor. This is not the first Manhattan grand jury to hear evidence about Mr. Trump. Before leaving office at the end of 2021, Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had directed prosecutors to begin presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury. That potential case focused on the former president’s business practices, in particular whether he fraudulently inflated his net worth by billions of dollars in order to secure favorable terms on loans and other benefits.But Mr. Bragg, soon after taking office last year, grew concerned about the strength of that case and halted the presentation, prompting two senior prosecutors leading the investigation to resign.Still, the portion of the investigation concerned with Mr. Trump’s net worth is continuing, people with knowledge of the matter said.Defendants rarely choose to testify before a grand jury and it is highly unlikely that Mr. Trump would do so. As a potential defendant, he would have to waive immunity, meaning that his testimony could be used against him if he were charged. Although he could have a lawyer present in the grand jury to advise him, the lawyer would be prohibited from speaking to the jurors, and there would be few limits on the questions prosecutors could ask the former president.In recent years, Mr. Trump has been wary of answering questions under oath, given the legal intrigue swirling around him. When the New York attorney general deposed him last year in a civil case, Mr. Trump refused to provide any information, availing himself of his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions more than 400 times over the course of four hours. If he testifies about the hush money to this grand jury, he will not have that option.Maggie Haberman More