Clifford, Stephanie (1979- )

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      Trump Puts His Legal Peril at Center of First Big Rally for 2024

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      Facing a potential indictment, the former president devoted much of his speech in Waco, Texas, to criticizing the justice system, though his attacks were less personal and caustic than in recent days.WACO, Texas — Former President Donald J. Trump spent much of his first major political rally of the 2024 campaign portraying his expected indictment by a New York grand jury as a result of what he claimed was a Democratic conspiracy to persecute him, arguing wildly that the United States was turning into a “banana republic.”As a crowd in Waco, Texas, waved red-and-white signs with the words “Witch Hunt” behind him, Mr. Trump devoted long stretches of his speech to his own legal jeopardy rather than his vision for a second term, casting himself as a victim of “weaponization” of the justice system.“The abuses of power that we’re currently witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history,” he said.The speech underscored how Mr. Trump tends to frame the nation’s broader political stakes heavily around whatever issues personally affect him the most. Last year, he sought to make his lies about fraud in his 2020 election defeat the most pressing issue of the midterms. On Saturday, he called the “weaponization of our justice system” the “central issue of our time.”Lamenting all the investigations he has faced in the last eight years that have — to date — not resulted in charges, Mr. Trump claimed that his legal predicament “probably makes me the most innocent man in the history of our country.”Mr. Trump tried, as he has before, to link his personal grievances to those of the crowd. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you,” he said.From the stage, Mr. Trump notably did not attack the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, in the kind of caustic terms that he had used on social media in recent days. This past week, he had called Mr. Bragg, who is Black, an “animal” and accused him of racism for pursuing a case based on hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election.Mr. Trump also refrained from echoing his ominous post that “potential death and destruction” might result if he were charged.He did attack one of Mr. Bragg’s senior counsels by name, noting that he came to the office from the Justice Department and describing the move, without evidence, as part of a national conspiracy. “They couldn’t get it done in Washington, so they said, ‘Let’s use local offices,’” Mr. Trump said.Pushing back on an investigation led by Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress, Mr. Bragg said in a statement on Saturday evening, “We evaluate cases in our jurisdiction based on the facts, the law and the evidence.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In a different investigation related to the handling of classified material, a federal appeals court ruled this past week that a lawyer representing Mr. Trump must answer a grand jury’s questions and provide documents to prosecutors. Mr. Trump’s team has tried to stop the lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, from turning over documents.Mr. Trump obliquely referred to the case, complaining that lawyers were once treated differently because of attorney-client privilege. “Now they get thrown in with everybody else,” he said.Mr. Trump reserved some fire for his leading rival in the polls for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not announced a campaign yet. “He’s dropping like a rock,” Mr. Trump said, pointing to his increased edge over Mr. DeSantis in recent surveys.He also argued that the greatest threat to the United States was not China or Russia but top American politicians, among them President Biden, Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who Mr. Trump said were “poisoning” the nation.In many ways, the event was a familiar festival of Mr. Trump’s grievances and a showcase for his enduring showmanship. His plane — “Trump Force One,” an announcer called it — buzzed the crowd of thousands with a flyover before landing.The rally featured one new twist: the playing of “Justice for All,” a song featuring the J6 Prison Choir, which is made up of men who were imprisoned for their part in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.The song, which topped some iTunes download charts, is part of a broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to reframe the riot and the effort to overturn the election as patriotic. The track features the men singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while Mr. Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance.The timing of a potential Trump indictment remains unknown. The Manhattan grand jury that is hearing the case is expected to reconvene on Monday.Michael C. Bender reported from Waco, Texas, and Shane Goldmacher from New York. More

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      As Trump Rallies in Texas, His Followers Shore Up His 2024 Bid

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      Despite a pattern of dangerous, erratic behavior, the former president remains a strong front-runner for his party’s nomination. His durability stems from his most loyal supporters.WACO, Texas — In the last 28 months, former President Donald J. Trump has been voted out of the White House, impeached for his role in the Capitol riot and criticized for marching many of his fellow Republicans off an electoral cliff in the 2022 midterms with his drumbeat of election-fraud lies.He dined at home with a white supremacist in November. He called for the termination of the Constitution in December. He declared himself “more angry” than ever in January. He vowed to make retribution a hallmark of a second term in the White House in March.He has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, described President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a genius and used a gay joke to mock a fellow Republican. He has become the target of four criminal investigations, including one in New York that he warned might result in “potential death & destruction.”Still, Mr. Trump remains a strong front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. At least one reason for this political durability was assembled Saturday morning outside the airport in the central Texas city of Waco in various combinations of red caps, antagonistic T-shirts and MAGA-button flair — the Trump die-hards.Starting before 8 a.m., more than nine hours before the former president was set to take the stage at the first rally of his 2024 campaign, his supporters streamed across dirt roads and formed an ever-growing line that zigzagged across the grass and bluebonnets, with a forest of Trump flags flying nearby. One sign nodded to both the F.B.I.’s search of Mr. Trump’s Florida property and the federal agency’s siege 30 years ago of a religious sect’s compound in this Texas city: “Remember the Alamo, Remember Waco, Remember Mar-a-Lago.”It is Mr. Trump’s base of hard-core followers, who show up to his rallies in force, that has allowed him to maintain his grip on the party despite a pattern of dangerous, discordant behavior that would have sunk most traditional politicians.Whether or not Mr. Trump can expand his support beyond his loyalists, as he must do to win a general election, remains an open question for Republican primary voters. But the loyalty of his superfans remains as strong as ever.They fly “Trump or Death” flags from Jeep Wranglers outside Mar-a-Lago. Many have fallen out with family and friends over their devotion to the former president. They view themselves as mistreated and unappreciated, and view Mr. Trump as not so much a man but a cause. “Jesus, Freedom & Trump” read the T-shirt worn by one woman who went to see the former president in Iowa recently.Amid overlapping investigations and the looming possibility of arrest, the ardor of these supporters has not faded but, many said, has grown only stronger.“I think it’s really disgusting,” said Leslie Splendoria, 71, who arrived early in Waco and said she had supported Mr. Trump since his first presidential run. “They’re trying to do anything they can to get rid of him.” She came to the event from Hutto, Texas, north of Austin, with her ex-husband, her daughter, her 3-year-old granddaughter and a small wagon of supplies for the long wait in line.“No one is safe,” said her daughter, Kimberly Splendoria, 38, wearing a red MAGA sweatshirt and a Trump hat and holding her daughter, Gigi. “They can just throw you in jail, indict you.”“Look at what happened on Jan. 6,” said Bob Splendoria, Leslie’s ex-husband. “You happened to be there and they arrest you.” He and Leslie said they had wanted to attend the protest in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but could not make it. Both said they would not have entered the Capitol.Hours later, Mr. Trump arrived, his plane buzzing the crowd with a flyover before landing.His speech was a familiar festival of grievances and focused heavily on his legal jeopardy, portraying his expected indictment by a New York grand jury as a result of what he claimed was a Democratic conspiracy to persecute him. He also argued that the United States was turning into a “banana republic.”One of the early speakers at the event, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, told attendees that he had pushed for Waco as the rally site after a call from Mr. Trump seeking suggestions. Speaking later to reporters, Mr. Patrick said he preferred Waco because it was centrally located and could attract Trump supporters from around the state. He said he had been unaware that it was the 30th anniversary of the bloody standoff with the Branch Davidians. “Nobody knew until some of you brought it up,” he said.Mr. Trump’s political strength has long proved difficult to fully measure. While polls show that he enjoys a commanding advantage in a Republican primary field, most surveys also show that about half of the party’s voters would prefer another nominee at this early phase in the 2024 contest.His final swing of campaign rallies before the midterm elections in November avoided key battleground states, where independent voters who largely disliked Mr. Trump had been expected to tilt results. His rallies last year instead included stops in Iowa and Ohio, two states that he had twice won easily.A recent call by Mr. Trump for his supporters to protest a potential indictment from the Manhattan district attorney received a tepid response and, in some cases, was met with pushback from other Republican leaders.Still, the support that Mr. Trump has coalesced has given him the luster of an incumbent in the primary contest. That means to overtake the former president, other Republican contenders face the difficult task of first peeling support away from Mr. Trump before they can persuade those same voters to back their own bid for the nomination.In Waco, some rallygoers were skeptical of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief potential rival.“I like DeSantis, I do, but the ground that needs to be covered is going to take Trump to get it done,” said Jeff Fiebert, 69, a farmer who described himself as a die-hard Trump supporter and who moved to Waco from California during the pandemic, a move he said was motivated almost entirely by politics.Asked what Mr. Trump could do that Mr. DeSantis could not, he said the former president was the kind of person “who goes into the bar and knocks all the bottles off the shelf just to see where they land.” Mr. DeSantis, he added, does not do that sort of thing.While the field of official Republican challengers remains small — Mr. DeSantis, for example, is still months away from an expected formal announcement — Mr. Trump has continued to tend to his die-hard supporters. He invited a handful of his most devoted rallygoers to his Mar-a-Lago resort in November for his official campaign announcement, and delivered private remarks to many of them in a small ballroom before his public speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference three weeks ago.Mr. Trump has spent years on the campaign trail persuading supporters to interpret pressure on him — from his opponents, law enforcement and members of Congress — as attacks on them. That is why some of his allies believe that becoming the first former president to face criminal charges — as expected in the Manhattan district attorney’s case — could carry political upside for Mr. Trump, at least in a Republican primary.“And no matter what happens,” Mr. Trump wrote this week in an email seeking supporters’ campaign contributions, “I’ll be standing right where I belong and where I’ve always been since the day I first announced I was running for President…Between them and YOU.”Trump rallygoers often explain their continued backing of Mr. Trump in terms of gratitude. They say he has stood up for them and, as a result, has been targeted with investigations into his company’s finances, his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.“I think it just helps him,” said Courtney Sodolak, 37, a nurse from outside Houston who arrived early in Waco.Ms. Sodolak, who was wearing a shirt that read, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Clintons Do,” connected the treatment of Mr. Trump to her own experience being kicked off social media platforms. She said she had been removed for posting conservative content, including images of Kyle Rittenhouse and of people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.“I’ve been through 60 Facebooks,” she said. “I can’t even have one in my own name.”The legal scrutiny of Mr. Trump, Ms. Sodolak maintained, is similarly unfair.“It makes him more relatable to what real people go through,” she said. “The social injustice.” More

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      Trump, Escalating Attacks, Raises Specter of Violence if He Is Charged

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      In an overnight post, the former president warned of “potential death and destruction” if he was indicted. Hours later, the Manhattan district attorney’s office received a threatening letter.In an overnight social media post, former President Donald J. Trump predicted that “potential death and destruction” may result if, as expected, he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, in connection with hush-money payments to a porn star made during the 2016 presidential campaign.Hours later, the district attorney’s office discovered a threatening letter addressed to Mr. Bragg containing white powder — later determined not to be dangerous — in its mailroom.The comments from Mr. Trump, made between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on his social media site, Truth Social, were a stark escalation in his rhetorical attacks on Mr. Bragg ahead of a likely indictment on charges that Mr. Trump said would be unfounded.“What kind of person,” Mr. Trump wrote of Mr. Bragg, “can charge another person, in this case a former president of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting president in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a crime, when it is known by all that NO crime has been committed, & also that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our country?”“Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!” the former president wrote.Mr. Bragg is weighing charges against Mr. Trump in connection with hush money that his former fixer and lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, paid late in the 2016 campaign to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump.The grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the case does not typically meet on Fridays, and an indictment is not expected until next week at the earliest. Although there have been several signals that Mr. Bragg’s office is close to an indictment, the exact timing of any charges remains unknown.Around midday on Friday, a threatening letter containing a suspicious white powder was found in the mailroom for the district attorney’s office, which is in the building where the grand jury meets, a spokesman for the Police Department said.In a statement, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said that Mr. Bragg had informed the office that the powder was immediately contained “and that the N.Y.P.D. Emergency Service Unit and the N.Y.C. Department of Environmental Protection determined there was no dangerous substance.” In that message, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, the office’s leadership assured prosecutors that “we are well-prepared for any possibility.”The envelope in which it was sent was addressed to Mr. Bragg, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The person said that inside the envelope was a single piece of white paper with a brief message containing the typewritten words “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU” followed by 13 exclamation points..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The district attorney’s office did not comment on Mr. Trump’s social media post. In an email to his staff last week, Mr. Bragg wrote that the office would “continue to apply the law evenly and fairly, and speak publicly only when appropriate.”“We do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York,” he added.Mr. Trump is also being investigated by the Justice Department in connection with his efforts to stay in power leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that he had just addressed on Jan. 6, 2021.In a post early Saturday morning, Mr. Trump erroneously claimed that he was to be arrested three days later and urged people to protest and “take our nation back.”Since then, he has called Mr. Bragg, the first Black district attorney in Manhattan, an “animal” and appeared to mock calls from some of his own allies for people to protest peacefully, or not at all.“Our country is being destroyed as they tell us to be peaceful,” Mr. Trump said in a post on Thursday.That day, Mr. Trump also posted an article about the investigation that featured a large picture of the former president holding a baseball bat, juxtaposed with an image of Mr. Bragg. The image was widely interpreted as menacing. On Friday, the social media post was deleted from Mr. Trump’s feed on Truth Social.Mr. Trump has also attacked Mr. Bragg for having received indirect financial support from the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.So far, Mr. Trump’s calls for protests have been largely ignored, with just handfuls of people coming out for a demonstration on Monday organized by some of his New York Republican allies.In a statement published Friday in Politico’s New York Playbook newsletter, a group of civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and former Gov. David Paterson, condemned Mr. Trump’s statements.“This disgraceful attack is not a dog whistle but a bullhorn of incendiary racist and antisemitic bile, spewed out for the sole purpose of intimidating and sabotaging a lawful, legitimate, fact-based investigation,” they said. “These ugly, hateful attacks on our judicial system must be universally condemned.”Sean Piccoli More

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      Sex, Lies and … Trump. What More Can You Ask For?

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      One thing we can be sure of: If this Stormy Daniels thing hurts Donald Trump politically, it will be for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with sex.Nobody cares whether or not the two of them once had an, um, intimate assignation. Although I do enjoy recalling that Daniels has referred to it as “the worst 90 seconds of my life.”Right now, the most pressing question is whether Trump committed a crime during the 2016 presidential campaign when his people paid Daniels to keep quiet about their mini-affair, an affair Trump denies ever took place. His lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and served more than a year in prison, but that apparently hasn’t caused Trump to question his own conduct.“The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,” Trump tweeted a few years back. “Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction.”We will stop here to note that our former president was a little off when it came to the word “role.” Only mentioning because it gives me an opportunity to recall that he once sent me a missive calling me a liar with “the face of a pig” in which he misspelled “too.”But about the sex. Our political history shows that while people are extremely interested in hearing about politicians’ bad behavior, they don’t base their votes on it.We’ve got a Republican presidential primary coming our way, and if Ron DeSantis is a big player, I think we can presume the Florida governor will win any morality standoff. This guy is apparently a very devoted husband. Whose wife, frankly, seems to be the brains behind his political career.DeSantis has been more or less following his party’s game plan, which is to change the subject when Trump’s legal problems come up and attack Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for presumably bringing the charges.“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said recently. “I just, I can’t speak to that.”Aha! The mention-by-attacking-the-mention approach! And the adding of “alleged” to all discussions of the affair. Much better than the DeSantis tactic of citing “people like our founding fathers” when it comes to exemplary private behavior. Once you get past George Washington it doesn’t take long before you are face to face with Thomas Jefferson’s four-decade entanglement with the enslaved Sally Hemings.The grand tradition of political sex scandals goes back a long way. The ancient Romans, after all, speculated about whether the emperor Nero and his mother had an incestuous … thing going. In early America, even deeply nonrambunctious John Adams was a target — people gossiped that he’d dispatched Gen. Charles Pinckney across the Atlantic to fetch four beautiful Englishwomen for them to share. (“I declare on my honor, if this be true, General Pinckney has kept them all four to himself and cheated me of my two,” Adams declared.)The people who are really affected by this sort of public gossip are the politicians who are the target, some of whom suffer greatly. Can’t believe Bill Clinton isn’t haunted by the fact that if one quote of his goes down in history, it’ll probably be, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”Or take my favorite subject, Grover Cleveland, who was the target of huge headlines claiming, inaccurately, that he’d fathered an illegitimate child. None of that bothered the citizenry — he won the popular vote for president in three straight elections. But the publicity tortured him, and for years his opponents enjoyed singing, “Ma, Ma, where’s Pa?”Not sure Grover ever totally got over it, even when his supporters got to retort, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”Now, publicity is never going to be an instrument of torture for Donald Trump. In fact, he’s reportedly all jazzed up about the possibility of doing one of the famous “perp walks” in which a suspect is paraded by Manhattan law officers past reporters after he’s arrested.And as we’ve seen, the American voters who liked Trump to begin with aren’t going to be turned off by a sex scandal. DeSantis’s support among Republicans actually seems to be dropping, maybe even sinking.There are way better lines of attack. Which do you think is worse for a president of the United States?A. Tried to bully a Georgia official into changing the election results.B. Ignored Justice Department demands that he return a pile of classified government documents he took with him when he left office.C. Incited his followers to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.D. No, no, I’m getting a headache.We haven’t even gotten to his advice to people who don’t love their children. That was part of a recent Trump video, in which he bragged that thanks to his reforms, farmers’ children wouldn’t have to pay inheritance tax on agricultural property.And Trump said he had also benevolently taken into consideration landowners who “don’t love your children so much.”Yes! “And there are some people that don’t,” he continued. “And maybe deservedly so, it won’t matter because frankly, you don’t have to leave them anything.”OK, Don Jr., this sort of thing might actually make you a sympathetic figure.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Michael Cohen’s Long Arc From Trump Ally to Chief Antagonist

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      He once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump. Now, he’s hoping to help prosecutors put him away.When Michael D. Cohen stood before a federal judge to ask for leniency, he attributed much of his behavior to the influence of one man: Donald J. Trump.“Time and time again,” Mr. Cohen told the judge at his sentencing in late 2018, “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.”Ever since, Mr. Cohen has made it his work to expose those deeds. He testified for roughly seven hours at a congressional hearing in 2019, describing Mr. Trump as a liar and a cheater who made racist remarks. Mr. Cohen also met with the special counsel Robert S. Mueller II’s investigators and federal prosecutors in New York. And he was the impetus for the New York attorney general’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s business practices, laying the groundwork for a lawsuit that accused the former president of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars.Mr. Cohen’s transformation from trusted fixer to chief antagonist — a 180-degree turn against a man he once vowed to take a bullet for — upended his life. He went to prison for 13 months and then faced home confinement for more than a year. He endured years of attacks from Mr. Trump’s allies, ultimately emerging with a book deal, cable news appearances and a podcast, “Mea Culpa.”Now, Mr. Cohen is poised to seize his biggest moment yet: a day in court against Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump could be indicted in Manhattan as soon as this week.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Cohen is the key witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into a hush-money payment to a porn star named Stormy Daniels. The payment, which Mr. Cohen said he made at Mr. Trump’s direction during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, blocked Ms. Daniels from telling her story of an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier.Mr. Cohen has met with the prosecutors some 20 times and recently testified before a grand jury that could indict Mr. Trump as soon as this week, people with knowledge of the matter said. And he has provided documentation that bolsters his testimony, the people added.Mr. Trump has denied having any sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels and accused the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, of carrying out a political “witch hunt” against him.Mr. Trump’s team and Mr. Cohen’s critics maintain he is playing a cynical game based on rescuing his reputation and capitalizing on his guilty plea. But his supporters — in Congress, in the Democratic Party and on his expansive social media presence — credit him with a high-risk decision to challenge a president, and force the first significant cracks in Mr. Trump’s edifice.This account of the long, strange and now historically consequential arc of Mr. Trump’s once-loyal lawyer and fixer is drawn from interviews with nearly a dozen people who know him, and records from his various legal entanglements. Collectively, they paint a portrait of a complicated witness — a convicted liar and an opportunist, but also a compelling presence, who notes that his lies were on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and whose emotional vulnerability and blunt recitation of history prosecutors may rely on to charm a jury.“I know there’s a debate about the utilization of Michael as a witness, and that is going to be a colorful cross-examination,” said Norman Eisen, who served as the counsel for House Democrats during the first impeachment inquiry and developed a relationship with Mr. Cohen over the course of multiple meetings.“In dealing with me, he has never varied from our first meeting in 2019 to today in the details of what happened both in the hush money and in the larger financial frauds.”‘He has his purpose’Mr. Cohen had long idolized Mr. Trump, and then went to work for him.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersMr. Cohen, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was a 2003 New York City Council candidate and a mega-fan of Mr. Trump’s public persona before going to work for him. He got the job after impressing Mr. Trump, defending him at a condo board meeting at a Trump building in 2006.And he endeared himself to Mr. Trump by trying to be an indispensable aide and pit bull adviser to a real-estate developer and reality-television star.Part of his role became anticipating Mr. Trump’s whims and desires, and interpreting directions spoken in what Mr. Cohen would later describe as “code.”Mr. Trump had a penchant for compartmentalizing his life. When one of Mr. Trump’s friends asked Mr. Trump why he kept Mr. Cohen around, Mr. Trump replied, “He has his purpose.”That purpose, Mr. Cohen later said, included cleaning up some of Mr. Trump’s messes.In October 2016, while visiting his daughter in London, Mr. Cohen received calls from top executives at The National Enquirer, which had forged close ties to Mr. Trump over the years. They warned that Ms. Daniels was looking to sell her story.Within days, Mr. Cohen hammered out the hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, securing Ms. Daniels’s silence at a crucial moment for the campaign.When Mr. Trump won the presidency soon after, Mr. Cohen did not accompany him to Washington, and left behind full-time employment at the Trump Organization to set up an office at the law firm Squire Patton Boggs in Midtown Manhattan.The Trump presidency was shaping up to be lucrative for Mr. Cohen: He soon had a roster of corporate clients, including a private equity firm, a large pharmaceutical company and even AT&T, as he held himself out as the personal lawyer to the president.But one issue trailed him: a complaint had been filed with the Federal Election Commission by the good-government group Common Cause about his payment to Ms. Daniels, which was publicly revealed in January 2018 by The Wall Street Journal.Soon, Mr. Cohen acknowledged to the F.E.C. and The New York Times that he had made the payment, insisting he did it on his own and that neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign had been a party to it. But he would not say whether Mr. Trump had been aware of the payment.At that time in Washington, Mr. Mueller’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with Russians in 2016, and whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice, was proceeding apace. So were congressional investigations into Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that discussions about a Trump Tower project in Moscow stopped in January 2016. That turned out to be a lie, for which he would later fault Mr. Trump; the discussions went on until June 2016, into the presidential campaign.Mr. Mueller’s team was also scrutinizing Mr. Cohen, including for the hush-money deal, but soon handed off that inquiry to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.The inquiry came to a head in April 2018, when F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Cohen’s office, home and a hotel where his family stayed while repair work went on at their apartment, taking emails, business records and other material. The event went off like a political bomb: The personal lawyer for a sitting president was the subject of an F.B.I. search based on probable cause that a crime was committed.It also imploded Mr. Cohen’s life. He confided in friends at the time that he was suicidal.As the search garnered wall-to-wall news coverage, Mr. Cohen received a call from Mr. Trump at the White House, with a message: stay strong.But as Mr. Cohen’s legal bills piled up, officials at the family-run Trump Organization began to balk at paying his lawyer, planting the seeds for Mr. Cohen’s break from a man he once idolized.A Seat at the Witness TableMr. Cohen was the sole witness at a 2019 hearing in Congress, where he likened Mr. Trump to “a mobster.”Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWithin months, the fracture between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen was clear.Mr. Cohen soon hired Lanny Davis, a Democrat and a veteran Washington lawyer who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House.Mr. Davis had seen Mr. Cohen on television and reached out to Stephen Ryan, Mr. Cohen’s lawyer at the time. Soon, Mr. Davis and Mr. Cohen were virtually inseparable.In August of 2018, the federal prosecutors in the Southern District readied charges against Mr. Cohen for the hush money and a range of unrelated financial crimes. Mr. Davis said the prosecutors threatened to charge Mr. Cohen’s wife, Laura, with the tax crimes as well.Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in that case, and later, in another case brought by Mr. Mueller related to his congressional testimony about the potential Trump hotel deal in Moscow.At his first plea hearing, on the hush-money payment, Mr. Cohen pointed the finger at Mr. Trump, who he said directed him to pay it, an accusation that prosecutors later substantiated.Mr. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison.Mr. Davis told Mr. Cohen that he had a path to winning back his credibility, but it wasn’t going to be enough to simply say he was sorry for what he had done. He would have to fully come clean about Mr. Trump, Mr. Davis said. Mr. Cohen told Mr. Davis he was ready.After his split with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen forged a relationship with Lanny Davis, left, a longtime Democrat who became his lawyer.Alex Brandon/Associated PressThey directed their effort at congressional Democrats, who were heading into their third year of investigations into Mr. Trump.In February 2019, Democrats announced that Mr. Cohen would appear at an unusual public hearing, the sole witness discussing the 45th president.Even before he arrived, Mr. Trump’s allies tried to intimidate him. Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, posted on Twitter an accusation that Mr. Cohen had been unfaithful to his wife — and she might not be loyal while he was in prison. Two of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina, wrote a joint op-ed attacking Mr. Cohen as a “liar.”But when Mr. Cohen assumed a seat at a witness table for what would become a daylong event, he appeared prepared for the onslaught. He fought back, potentially foreshadowing how he might respond to attacks from Mr. Trump’s lawyers on the witness stand in the Manhattan case.“By coming today, I have caused my family to be the target of personal, scurrilous attacks by the president and his lawyer trying to intimidate me from appearing before this panel,” Mr. Cohen said in opening remarks at the congressional hearing. “Mr. Trump called me a rat for choosing to tell the truth, much like a mobster would do when one of his men decides to cooperate with the government.”As Mr. Jordan tried to rattle him, Mr. Cohen replied sternly, “Shame on you.”And Mr. Cohen delivered a striking prediction about what might happen the following year: “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” he said.Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat from Baltimore and the committee chair, who knew Mr. Davis and had invited Mr. Cohen, told him “I know that you are worried about your family, but this is a part of your destiny.”In May 2019, Mr. Cohen began serving his time at a minimum security facility at Otisville, N.Y. It was there that he began to meet with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.Mr. Cohen was released in May 2020 on a medical furlough. But he was soon thrown back in prison by the Trump administration’s Bureau of Prisons, after he refused to sign a document stating he would not write a book, something he was doing.About two weeks later, a judge ordered him released, saying the move was “retaliatory.” He has told friends that he spent 51 days overall in solitary confinement.Twenty VisitsAgain and again in recent years, Mr. Cohen has visited the Manhattan district attorney’s office for meetings with prosecutors.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersBy early 2022, Mr. Cohen was home from prison and his visits with prosecutors moved to their offices in Lower Manhattan. Beginning in January of this year, he seemed to visit almost weekly, staging impromptu news conferences outside to tell reporters that his former boss was in trouble.Mr. Cohen is hardly a perfect witness. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will undoubtedly attack his character and invoke his criminal record. Some appear eager to cross-examine him.This week, at the request of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, one of Mr. Cohen’s former legal advisers testified before the grand jury in hopes of undercutting Mr. Cohen’s credibility. The witness, Robert J. Costello, briefly advised Mr. Cohen when he was facing the federal investigation in 2018, but they had a falling out as Mr. Cohen began taking public swipes at Mr. Trump.Mr. Costello, who was close with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said he told the grand jury that Mr. Cohen was a liar. Mr. Cohen, in turn, said on MSNBC that Mr. Costello “lacks for any sense of veracity.”His cable news appearances, in which he makes off-the-cuff remarks about Mr. Trump and the investigation, have become quite frequent. Even the prosecutors who are relying on Mr. Cohen — and have decided to stake a large part of their case on his testimony — occasionally shake their heads at his media presence, according to a person close to the case.But Mr. Cohen, who has said he feels the need to defend himself publicly, has largely won the at least qualified approval of the district attorney’s office. In his book, Mark F. Pomerantz, the prosecutor who helped lead the investigation until early 2022, wrote that Mr. Cohen had impressed him as “smart but manipulative.”“He struck me as a somewhat feral creature,” Mr. Pomerantz continued. “Most importantly, I thought he was telling the truth.”Mr. Pomerantz argued that Mr. Cohen would play well with jurors, and that his anger at Mr. Trump could be explained: “He was angry with Trump because Trump had seduced Cohen into his criminal orbit, and Cohen had been the only one of Trump’s enablers to have gone to prison. Cohen was angry with himself for allowing himself to be seduced by Trump.”Mr. Cohen’s comprehensive knowledge of the hush-money case is likely another draw for prosecutors. The former fixer could connect all the dots that led to the payment. He liaised with each witness, and with Mr. Trump himself.On the first day of his grand jury testimony this month, when Mr. Cohen stopped outside the courthouse to entertain questions from reporters, he harkened back to what he had told the judge five years earlier.“This is all about accountability,” he said. “He needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds.” More

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      The Politics of a Trump Indictment

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      If you intend to indict and try a former president of the United States, especially a former president of the United States whose career has benefited from the collapse of public trust in the neutrality of all our institutions, you had better have clear evidence, all-but-obvious guilt and loads of legal precedent behind your case.The case that New York prosecutors are apparently considering bringing against Donald Trump, over hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels that may have violated campaign finance laws, does not have the look of a slam dunk. The use of the phrase “novel legal theory” in descriptions of what the case might entail is not encouraging.Neither are the doubts raised by writers and pundits not known for their sympathy to Trump. Or the fact that we have a precedent of a presidential candidate indicted over a remarkably similar offense — the trial of John Edwards for his payments to Rielle Hunter — that yielded an acquittal on one count and a hung jury on the rest.The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky precedent is a little less legally relevant, involving perjury rather than campaign-finance law. But the Clinton scandals established a general principle that presidents are above the law as long as the lawbreaking involved minor infractions covering up tawdry sex. If a potential Trump prosecution requires overturning that principle, then prosecutors might as well appear in court wearing Democratic Party campaign paraphernalia; the effect will be the same.That effect does not need to benefit Trump politically to make such a prosecution unwise or reckless. An indictment could hurt him at the polls and still be a very bad long-term idea — setting a precedent that will pressure Republican prosecutors to indict Democratic politicians on similarly doubtful charges, establish a pattern of legal revenge‌ seeking against the out-of-power party and encourage polarization’s continued transformation into enmity.But of course, the political question is inescapable: Will an indictment help Trump or hurt him in his quest to reclaim the Republican nomination and the presidency?Two generalizations are relatively easy to make. Even a partisan-seeming indictment won’t do anything to make Trump more popular with the independent voters who swing presidential elections; it will just be added baggage for a politician already widely regarded as chaotic and immoral and unfit for the office.At the same time, even an airtight indictment would be regarded as persecution by Trump’s most devoted fans. So whether or not there’s a wave of MAGA protests now, you would expect the spectacle of a prosecution to help mobilize and motivate his base in 2024.Alexander Burns of Politico argues that these two points together are a net negative for Trump. After all, he doesn’t need to mobilize his base. They will mostly be there for him, no matter what; he needs to persuade the doubtful and exhausted that he’s their man in 2024. And if even a few of these voters get weary of another round of Stormy Daniels sleaze, then he’s worse off. Burns writes, “If each scandal or blunder binds 99 percent of his base closer to him and unsettles 1 percent, that is still a losing formula for a politician whose base is an electoral minority. Trump cannot shed fractional support with every controversy but make it up on volume.”I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. That’s because in addition to the true base voter (who will be with Trump in any case) and the true swing voter (who probably pulled the lever for Joe Biden last time), there’s the Republican primary swing voter: the voter who’s part of Trump’s base for general election purposes but doesn’t love him absolutely, the voter who’s open to Ron DeSantis but swings between the two Florida Republicans, depending on the headlines at the moment.I can tell you two stories about how this kind of voter reacts to an indictment. In one, Trump does well with this constituency when he’s either out of the news or on the offensive and does worse when he seems weakened, messy, a loser. Hence the DeSantis bump in polling immediately after the 2022 midterms, when the underperformance of Trump’s favored candidates damaged his mystique and his flailing afterward made him look impotent. Hence his apparent recovery in polling more recently, as he’s taken the fight to DeSantis without the Florida governor striking back, making Trump look stronger than his not-yet-campaigning rival.Under this theory, even a politicized and partisan indictment returns Trump to a flailing position, making him seem like a victim rather than a master of events, a stumbling loser caught in liberal nets. So the Republican swing voter behaves like the general-election swing voter and recoils, and the disciplined DeSantis benefits.But there’s an alternative story, in which our Republican swing voter is invested not in specific candidates so much as in the grand battle with the liberal political establishment. In this theory the DeSantis brand is built on his being a battler, a scourge of cultural liberalism in all its forms, while Trump has lost ground by appearing more interested in battling his fellow Republicans, even to the point of hurting the G.O.P. cause and helping liberals win.What happens, though, when institutional liberalism seems to take the fight to Trump? (Yes, I know a single prosecutor isn’t institutional liberalism, but that’s how this will be perceived.) When the grand ideological battle is suddenly joined around his person, his position, his very freedom?Well, maybe that seems like confirmation of the argument that certain Trumpists have been making for a while — that there’s nothing the establishment fears more than a Trump restoration, that “they can’t let him back in,” as the former Trump White House official Michael Anton put it last year. And so if you care most about ideological conflict, it doesn’t matter if you don’t love him as his true supporters do; where Trump stands, there you must stand as well.This is the rally-to-Trump effect that seems most imaginable if an indictment comes — not a burst of zeal for the man himself but a repetition of the enemy-of-my-enemy dynamic that’s been crucial to his resilience all along.Of course, since at least some Democrats would be happy to see Trump rather than DeSantis as the nominee, you could argue that in this scenario the spoiling-for-a-fight conservatives would be essentially letting themselves be manipulated into fighting on the wrong battlefield, for the wrong leader, with the wrong stakes.But persuading them of that will fall to DeSantis himself, whose own campaign will make one of these two narratives of Republican psychology look prophetic ‌— the first in victory, the second in defeat.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Cronología del soborno a una actriz porno que podría culminar en una acusación formal contra Trump

      by

      Los fiscales de Manhattan que investigan un pago realizado a Stormy Daniels podrían estar a punto de convertir a Donald J. Trump en el primer expresidente estadounidense en ser acusado penalmente.En aquel momento, todo era más sórdido que trascendental. Una estrella de la telerrealidad invitó a una actriz porno que tenía la mitad de su edad a una habitación de hotel después de una ronda en un torneo de golf de celebridades. Ella llegó con un vestido de lentejuelas doradas y tacones con tiras. Él le prometió salir en televisión y luego, ella aseguró, se acostaron.Sin embargo, la cadena de acontecimientos derivados del encuentro de 2006 que la estrella del cine para adultos Stormy Daniels ha dicho que tuvo con la personalidad de la televisión Donald Trump está a punto de convertirse en un acontecimiento histórico: la primera acusación penal formal contra un expresidente de Estados Unidos.El fiscal de distrito de Manhattan Alvin Bragg señaló que está preparándose para presentar cargos por delitos graves contra Trump; se espera que Bragg lo acuse de ocultar los 130.000 dólares que Michael D. Cohen, el abogado y solucionador de problemas de Trump, le pagó a Daniels a cambio de su silencio antes de las elecciones presidenciales de 2016.Es probable que la condena dependa de que los fiscales demuestren que Trump reembolsó a Cohen y falsificó registros comerciales cuando lo hizo, posiblemente para ocultar una violación de la ley electoral.No sería un caso sencillo. Se espera que los fiscales utilicen una teoría jurídica que no ha sido evaluada en los tribunales de Nueva York, lo que plantea la posibilidad de que un juez pueda desestimar o limitar los cargos. El episodio ha sido analizado tanto por la Comisión Federal Electoral como por fiscales federales de Nueva York; ninguno tomó medidas contra Trump.Trump ha negado haber tenido relaciones sexuales con Daniels y asegura no haber hecho nada malo. El expresidente, que aspira a la candidatura republicana a la Casa Blanca en 2024, ha dejado claro que tachará la acusación de “cacería de brujas” política y la utilizará para movilizar a sus partidarios. El sábado, predijo que sería detenido el martes y convocó protestas.El principal testigo de los fiscales sería Cohen, quien se declaró culpable de violaciones al financiamiento de campañas federales en agosto de 2018 y admitió que ayudó a concertar el pago a Daniels —además de otro pago a una exmodelo de Playboy— para ayudar a la candidatura presidencial de Trump por órdenes de Trump.Cualquier acusación contra Trump presentada por el fiscal de distrito de Manhattan, Alvin L. Bragg, se sustentaría en una teoría legal que no ha sido probada en los tribunales de Nueva York, lo que hace que su éxito no esté para nada garantizado.Benjamin Norman para The New York TimesUna acusación formal marcaría otro episodio extraordinario en la era de Trump: un expresidente —cuyo mandato concluyó con una revuelta en el Capitolio, que trató de revocar unas elecciones justas y quien está bajo investigación por no devolver documentos clasificados— podría enfrentar su primera acusación penal por pagar por el silencio de una estrella porno.Un encuentro en el lago TahoeDaniels, cuyo nombre de pila es Stephanie Gregory y vivió la mayor parte de su infancia en un rancho destartalado en Baton Rouge, Luisiana, tenía 27 años en julio de 2006, cuando conoció a Trump, que entonces tenía 60, en el torneo de golf para famosos celebrado en Nevada.En su autobiografía de 2018, Full Disclosure, Daniels recuerda haberse sentido avergonzada y motivada a tomar el rumbo que tomó tras escuchar, siendo niña, al padre de un amigo referirse a ella como “escoria blanca”. Atraída por el dinero que podía ganar, Daniels comenzó a trabajar como bailarina exótica en un antro local llamado Cinnamon’s, incluso antes de terminar el bachillerato. A los 23 años, comenzó a actuar en películas pornográficas y poco después se casó con el primero de sus cuatro esposos: Bartholomew Clifford, quien dirigió películas para adultos bajo el nombre “Pat Myne”.Cuando conoció a Daniels, Trump ya se había transformado de magnate inmobiliario a estrella de telerrealidad; había viajado al torneo sin su tercera esposa, Melania, que se quedó en casa con su hijo recién nacido. Trump y Daniels se cruzaron en el campo de golf y más tarde en la sala de regalos, donde fueron fotografiados juntos en un estand de su productora de contenido pornográfico, Wicked Pictures. Trump la invitó a cenar.Mientras charlaban esa noche en el penthouse de Trump en Harrah’s Lake Tahoe —Daniels ha dicho que Trump llevaba un pijama de seda negro y pantuflas— él le dijo que debería participar en El aprendiz, un programa de telerrealidad de la NBC. Daniels dudo que él pudiera lograr que ella participara en el programa. Él le aseguró que sí, contó Daniels.De allí en adelante, Trump comenzó a llamarla de vez en cuando desde un número bloqueado, y le decía “honeybunch” (cariñito, en español). Se vieron al menos dos veces más en 2007, en una fiesta de presentación del efímero vodka Trump y en el hotel Beverly Hills, donde vieron la programación de la Semana del tiburón. Pero no volvieron a tener relaciones. Trump nunca la llevó a El aprendiz. Aun así, siguió llamándola, según ella. Al final, ella dejó de contestar.Vendiendo historiasStormy Daniels, una estrella de cine para adultos, recibió 130.000 dólares del mediador de Trump a cambio de su silencio.Shannon Stapleton/ReutersDesde el año 2000, Trump protagonizó campañas presidenciales improbables que parecían más trucos publicitarios que candidaturas serias. En 2011 inició otra, en la que promovió teorías conspirativas según las cuales el entonces presidente Barack Obama había nacido fuera del territorio estadounidense. Mientras lo hacía, Daniels, aún molesta, empezó a trabajar con una agente para ver si podía vender la historia de sus encuentros.Negociaron un trato por 15.000 dólares con Life & Style, una revista de farándula. Daniels le dijo al reportero que la entrevistó que creía que la oferta de Trump de convertirla en concursante había sido una mentira, según una transcripción que apareció después en internet.“¿Crees que solo fue para impresionarte, para intentar acostarse contigo?”, preguntó el reportero. “Sí”, respondió Daniels. “Y supongo que funcionó”, agregó.Cuando la revista contactó a la Organización Trump en busca de comentarios, Cohen devolvió la llamada. El abogado se había incorporado a la empresa cuatro años antes y se había convertido en el solucionador de Trump, haciendo todo lo necesario para resolver los problemas difíciles de su jefe y la familia Trump. Cohen amenazó con demandar, la revista eliminó el reportaje y Daniels no recibió ni un centavo.Por su parte, Trump abandonó la contienda presidencial y siguió siendo el presentador de El aprendiz.En octubre de ese año, la historia de Daniels sobre Trump salió a la luz de manera fugaz después de que su agente la filtrara a un blog de chismes llamado The Dirty, con la finalidad de despertar el interés de alguna publicación que quisiera pagar por la historia. Un par de medios de comunicación le dieron seguimiento, pero ninguno ofreció una remuneración. Daniels negó la historia, y su agente hizo que un abogado de Beverly Hills, California, Keith Davidson, retirara la publicación.Cuando Obama se preparaba para dejar el cargo en 2015, Trump decidió presentarse de nuevo a las elecciones presidenciales. Ese agosto, se sentó en su oficina de la Torre Trump con Cohen y David Pecker, el editor de American Media Inc. y su periódico sensacionalista más importante, The National Enquirer.Pecker, amigo de toda la vida de Trump, había recurrido a The Enquirer para impulsar las anteriores campañas presidenciales de Trump. Según tres personas familiarizadas con la reunión, Pecker prometió publicar historias positivas sobre Trump y negativas sobre sus rivales. También acordó trabajar con Cohen para encontrar y suprimir historias que pudieran perjudicar los nuevos esfuerzos de Trump, una práctica conocida como “atrapar y matar”.El National Enquirer, un tabloide dirigido por David Pecker, desempeñó un papel central en los esfuerzos por “atrapar y matar” historias negativas sobre Trump.Marion Curtis vía Associated PressEn la primavera de 2016, Daniels, con ayuda de su agente, intentó vender su historia de nuevo, esta vez por más de 200.000 dólares. Pero las publicaciones a las que contactó la rechazaron, incluido The Enquirer.Más o menos por esas fechas, Karen McDougal, exmodelo de Playboy, comenzó a explorar cómo monetizar su propia historia de su encuentro con Trump. McDougal, quien fue la conejita del año de Playboy en 1998, ha declarado haber tenido un amorío con Trump desde 2006, cuando ella tenía 35 años. Habían pasado tiempo juntos en su apartamento de la Torre Trump y en el mismo torneo de golf donde se dio el encuentro con Daniels. Pero según McDougal, ella puso fin a la relación en 2007. Trump ha negado el romance.En 2016, con su carrera como modelo en declive, McDougal contrató a Davidson, el mismo abogado que había ayudado a Daniels a eliminar la publicación del blog de 2011.Karen McDougal, exmodelo de Playboy, aseguró que también tuvo un amorío con Trump y que National Enquirer le pagó por su historia, la cual nunca fue publicada.Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for BacardiEl abogado se puso en contacto con el editor de The Enquirer, Dylan Howard, para venderle la historia de McDougal, y, según declaraciones de tres personas con conocimiento de las conversaciones, tanto Howard como Pecker informaron a Cohen. A finales de junio, Trump pidió personalmente ayuda a Pecker para mantener a McDougal en silencio, según un testimonio de Pecker ante los fiscales federales.Sni embargo, el tabloide no hizo nada sino hasta que McDougal estaba a punto de conceder una entrevista a ABC News. A principios de agosto, American Media acordó pagarle a McDougal 150.000 dólares por los derechos exclusivos de su historia sobre Trump, camuflando el verdadero propósito del acuerdo al garantizarle que aparecería en dos portadas de revistas, entre otras cosas, según han declarado cinco personas familiarizadas con los hechos.American Media admitiría después, en un acuerdo para evitar un proceso federal, que el principal propósito del acuerdo fue suprimir la historia de McDougal, la cual la empresa no tenía intención alguna de publicar.Mientras tanto, Daniels seguía sin encontrar a alguien que quisiera comprar su historia. Su suerte cambiaría a principios de octubre.‘Podría hacernos ver muy mal’El solucionador de problemas de Trump, Michael D. Cohen, a la derecha, fue a prisión en parte por violaciones de financiamiento de campañas relacionadas con pagos de sobornos. Le ha dado la espalda al expresidente y podría testificar en su contra.Jefferson Siegel para The New York TimesLa noticia cayó como una bomba en la contienda presidencial. El 7 de octubre de 2016, el diario The Washington Post publicó lo que se conocería como la cinta Access Hollywood, en la que Trump, sin darse cuenta de que el micrófono estaba encendido, fue grabado mientras describía en términos lascivos cómo manoseaba a las mujeres.La gente que rodeaba a Daniels se dio cuenta enseguida de que la nueva vulnerabilidad de Trump la convertía en una amenaza mayor, y por lo tanto su historia había ganado valor. Davidson, el abogado de Los Ángeles, también era amigo de la agente de Daniels, Gina Rodríguez, y del editor de The Enquirer, Howard. El día después de la aparición de la cinta Access Hollywood, Davidson y Howard se enviaron mensajes de texto sobre el daño que la cinta había causado a la campaña de Trump. Entonces, Howard le pidió a la agente de Daniels que le enviara otro mensaje a su jefe, Pecker.Los ejecutivos del Enquirer alertaron a Cohen, quien le pidió ayuda a Pecker para contener la historia.Howard regateó con la agente de Daniels, pero cuando le presentó a Pecker una oferta para comprar la historia por 120.000 dólares, el editor se negó.“Tal vez llame a Michael para avisarle y que él se encargue desde allí”, escribió Howard.Dylan Howard, editor del National Enquirer, conectó a Cohen con un abogado de Daniels para discutir un pago por la historia de su encuentro con Trump.Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images para American MediaEsa noche, Cohen habló por teléfono con Trump, Pecker y Howard, según los registros obtenidos por las autoridades federales. Howard lo puso en contacto con el abogado, Davidson, quien negociaría el acuerdo en nombre de Daniels.Tres días después de la difusión de la cinta de Access Hollywood, Cohen aceptó pagar 130.000 dólares en un acuerdo que amenazaba con graves sanciones económicas para Daniels si alguna vez hablaba de su aventura con Trump. El contrato utilizó seudónimos: Peggy Peterson, o “PP”, para Daniels, y David Dennison, o “DD”, para Trump. Sus identidades solo se revelaban en una carta adjunta.Daniels firmó su copia sobre la cajuela de un auto cerca de un plató de filmación de una película pornográfica en Calabasas, California. Cohen firmó en nombre de Trump.Pero Cohen pospuso el pago. Ha dicho que estaba intentando averiguar de dónde sacar el dinero mientras Trump hacía campaña. Según Cohen, Trump había aprobado el pago y delegado en él y en el director financiero de la Organización Trump la tarea de organizarlo. Consideraron opciones para canalizar el dinero a través de la empresa, dijo Cohen, pero no se decidieron por una solución.Daniels comenzó a sentir que Trump intentaba darle largas al asunto hasta después de las elecciones del 8 de noviembre; si perdía, su historia perdería valor. A mediados de octubre, después de que Cohen incumpliera dos plazos del pago, el abogado de Daniels canceló el acuerdo, y la actriz porno empezó de nuevo a vender la historia. A la semana siguiente, Howard envió un mensaje de texto a Cohen diciéndole que si Daniels lo hacía público, su trabajo para encubrir el encuentro sexual también podría darse a conocer.“Podría hacernos ver muy mal a todos”, escribió Howard.Cohen aceptó hacer el pago de su propio bolsillo. Habló brevemente con Trump en dos ocasiones. Luego, transfirió 130.000 dólares de su línea personal de crédito a la cuenta de una empresa ficticia de Delaware y se los transfirió al abogado de Daniels.Davidson hizo circular un nuevo acuerdo de dinero por silencio. Daniels lo firmó y notarizó en una tienda UPS cerca de un Walmart Supercenter en Forney, Texas, cerca de su casa.“Espero que todo esté bien entre nosotros”, le escribió Cohen a Davidson en un mensaje de texto después.“Le aseguro que todo está muy bien”, respondió el abogado.Daniels guardó silencio. Una semana y media después, Trump ganó las elecciones.Una vez en la Casa Blanca, Trump se ocupó de otro asunto relacionado con Daniels. Firmó cheques para reembolsarle a Cohen el soborno.Jonah E. Bromwich More

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      Dissecting Charges That Could Arise From the Trump Investigations

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      Prosecutors in New York, Georgia and the Justice Department face complex choices about what crimes to charge if they decide to indict Donald Trump.WASHINGTON — Prosecutors like to say that they investigate crimes, not people. The looming decision by the Manhattan district attorney about whether to indict former President Donald J. Trump on charges related to an alleged hush money payment to a porn actress is highlighting the complexity of the legal calculations being made by prosecutors in New York, Georgia and the Justice Department as they examine Mr. Trump’s conduct on a number of fronts.The investigations — which also focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after leaving office — are confronting prosecutors with tough choices. They must decide whether and how to charge not just Mr. Trump, but also associates who could face jeopardy for actions to which he was not a direct party, like mail or wire fraud for communications that he did not participate in.The publicly known understanding of the evidence is incomplete. It is not clear, for example, in several instances what facts investigators have been able to gather about Mr. Trump’s personal knowledge, directions and intentions related to several of the matters.Here is a look at some of the criminal laws that different prosecutors appear to be weighing and how they might apply to Mr. Trump’s actions.Stormy Daniels was paid $130,000.Markus Schreiber/Associated PressThe Stormy Daniels Hush Money PaymentOverviewAlvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, appears to be nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump with a crime related to his $130,000 hush money payment just before the 2016 election to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who has said they had an extramarital affair. Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, sent the money to Ms. Daniels, and the Trump Organization reimbursed him over the course of 2017, according to a 2018 federal court filing in Mr. Cohen’s case. Mr. Trump’s business concealed the true purpose of the payments, the filing said, by recording them as having been for a legal retainer that did not exist.Potential charge: Bookkeeping fraudThe New York Times has reported that the case may include a potential charge of falsifying business records under Article 175 of the New York Penal Law. A conviction for a felony version of bookkeeping fraud carries a sentence of up to four years.To prove that Mr. Trump committed that offense, prosecutors would seemingly need evidence showing that he had knowingly caused subordinates to make a false entry in his company’s records “with intent to defraud.” For the action to be a felony rather than a misdemeanor, prosecutors would also need to show that Mr. Trump falsified the business records with the intention of committing, aiding or concealing a second crime.The public understanding of Mr. Bragg’s theory of the case remains murky and incomplete. The district attorney’s office has reportedly weighed invoking alleged campaign-finance violations as that intended second crime, which could raise complications. Among other things, presidential elections are governed by federal law, and it is not clear whether Mr. Bragg has found a theory by which a state campaign law covered Mr. Trump’s actions, or if a state prosecutor can cite a law over which he lacks jurisdiction. It remains possible that Mr. Bragg has obtained nonpublic evidence of some other intended offense, like if there was any initial intention to deduct the payments as a business expense on state tax returns.Bookkeeping fraud has a two-year statute of limitations as a misdemeanor and a five-year one as a felony, both of which would normally have expired for payments made to Mr. Cohen in 2017. But New York law extends those limits to cover periods when a defendant was continuously out of state, as when Mr. Trump was while living in the White House or at his home in Florida. In addition, during the pandemic, New York’s statute of limitations was extended by more than a year.Mr. Trump has claimed — without evidence — that he declassified all the files taken to Mar-a-Lago.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe Mar-a-Lago DocumentsOverviewJack Smith, a special counsel for the federal Justice Department, is investigating matters related to Mr. Trump’s handling of several hundred documents marked as classified that he kept at his Florida club and home, Mar-a-Lago, after leaving office, and how Mr. Trump resisted efforts by the government to retrieve all of those files. After the Justice Department obtained a subpoena for all remaining files marked as classified, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, M. Evan Corcoran, turned over some while helping to draft a statement falsely saying those were all that remained. In August, the F.B.I. executed a search warrant and found 103 more, including in Mr. Trump’s desk.Prosecutors last week persuaded a federal judge that Mr. Corcoran should be compelled to answer more questions from a grand jury investigating the documents matter, notwithstanding attorney-client privilege. That means the judge agreed with prosecutors that the situation met the threshold for an exception for lawyer communications or work that apparently helped further a crime.Potential charge: Unauthorized retention of national security documentsOne of the charges the F.B.I. listed in its affidavit for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant was Section 793(e) of Title 18, a provision of the Espionage Act. Prosecutors would have to show that Mr. Trump knew he was still in possession of the documents after leaving the White House and failed to comply when the government asked him to return them and then subpoenaed him. The theoretical penalty is up to 10 years per such document.Prosecutors would also have to show that the documents related to the national defense, that they were closely held and that their disclosure could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Although Mr. Trump has claimed — without evidence — that he declassified all the files taken to Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors would not need to prove that they were still classified because the Espionage Act predates the classification system and does not refer to it as an element..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Potential charge: ObstructionAnother charge in the F.B.I. affidavit was Section 1519 of Title 18, which makes it a crime to conceal records to obstruct an official effort. Prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump knew he still had files that were responsive to the National Archives’ efforts to take custody of presidential records and the Justice Department’s subpoena for files marked as classified, and that he intentionally caused his subordinates to fail to turn them all over while leading officials to believe they had complied. The penalty is up to 20 years per offense.Potential charge: Mishandling official documentsA third charge in the affidavit was Section 2071 of Title 18, which criminalizes the concealment or destruction of official documents, whether or not they were related to national security. Among other things, former aides to Mr. Trump have recounted how he sometimes ripped up official documents, and the National Archives has said that some of the Trump White House paper records transferred to it had been torn up — some of which were taped back together and some of which were not reconstructed. The penalty is up to three years per offense plus a ban on holding federal office, although the latter is most likely unconstitutional, legal experts say.Potential charge: Contempt of courtSection 402 of Title 18 makes it a crime to willfully disobey a court order, like the grand jury subpoena Mr. Trump received in May 2022 requiring him to turn over all documents with classification markings remaining in his possession. It carries a penalty of a fine of up to $1,000 and up to six months in prison. To bring this charge, prosecutors would need evidence showing he knew that he was still holding onto other files with classification markings during and after his representatives purported to comply with the subpoena.Potential charge: Conspiracy to make a false statementSection 1001 of Title 18 makes it a crime to make a false statement to a law enforcement officer about a fact material to the officer’s investigation, and Section 371 makes it a crime to conspire with another person to break that or any other law. It carries a penalty of up to five years. Prosecutors would need to be able to show that Mr. Trump and Mr. Corcoran knew and agreed that the lawyer should lie to the Justice Department about there being no further documents responsive to the subpoena.Ballots being recounted in Atlanta, which is part of Fulton County, in 2020.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe Georgia Election Law InvestigationOverviewFani T. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., is investigating events related to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn President Biden’s narrow victory in that state in the 2020 election. Among other things, in a phone call that was recorded and leaked, Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and pressured him to “find” enough additional votes for him to flip the outcome.Ms. Willis is also investigating Trump associates’ efforts to get 16 of his supporters to falsely declare themselves to be an alternative slate of electors from Georgia, which helped lay the groundwork for Mr. Trump’s push to get Vice President Mike Pence to reject the true results when Congress met to certify the election on Jan. 6, 2021.Potential charges: Election code violationsMost elections offenses in Georgia’s code are misdemeanors, but there are several felony charges that Ms. Willis may be considering, based on the same basic set of facts. These include Section 21-2-603, which makes it a crime to conspire with another person to violate a provision of the election code, and Section 21-2-604, which makes it a crime to solicit another person to commit election fraud.To bring such a charge against Mr. Trump, prosecutors would need to cite another election law whose violation was his alleged goal. It is possible, for example, that they might be considering contending that Mr. Trump’s pushing Mr. Raffensperger to “find” additional votes amounted to implicitly asking him to violate a provision that makes it a felony for the secretary of state to alter official election records, but Mr. Trump’s language was not explicit.Potential charge: RacketeeringMs. Willis has indicated that she is considering bringing charges under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. So-called RICO laws are tools that were developed to make it easier to go after organized criminal enterprises, and can be used against members of any group that engaged in a pattern of criminal activities with a common purpose. A conviction would carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.To convict Mr. Trump under Georgia’s RICO law, Section 16-14-4, prosecutors would need to show that as part of his efforts with associates to overturn Georgia’s election results, he conspired with others or engaged in two or more offenses from a list of several dozen offenses, most of which are violent crimes but which include things like solicitation, forgery and making materially false statements to state officials.The House Jan. 6 committee made a criminal referral of Mr. Trump and others to the Justice Department.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe 2020 Election and Jan. 6OverviewMr. Smith, the special counsel, is also conducting a broader federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and the events of Jan. 6. The House committee that carried out the investigation into the riot last year made a criminal referral of Mr. Trump and others to the Justice Department. While that was of largely symbolic value — the department already had an investigation open and Congress has no authority to prosecute — the analysis in the panel’s final report sets out possible charges that Mr. Smith could also consider.Potential charge: Obstruction of an official proceedingOne criminal accusation the Jan. 6 committee leveled against Mr. Trump was the attempted corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, under Section 1512(c) of Title 18. It is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors have used this law to charge about 300 ordinary Jan. 6 defendants — people who rioted — and an appeals court is currently weighing whether that charge has been appropriately applied in those cases. But even if the judiciary upholds use of the charge, such a case against Mr. Trump would be very different since he did not physically participate in the riot.The Jan. 6 committee argued that he could be charged with it based on two sets of actions. First, it argued that his summoning of supporters to Washington and urging them to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” violated that law. Mr. Trump’s defense team would surely seek to raise doubt about whether he intended for his supporters to riot, including because he also told them to protest “peacefully.”Second, the committee portrayed as criminal obstruction the scheme to recruit so-called fake electors from various states and pressuring Mr. Pence to cite their existence as a basis to delay certifying the election. The panel stressed how Mr. Trump had been told that there was no truth to his claims of a stolen election, which it said proved his intentions were corrupt. Among other things, Mr. Trump’s defense team would surely argue that because a lawyer, John Eastman, advised him to take those steps, there is no proof he understood that doing so was illegal.Potential charge: Conspiracy to defraud the United StatesA second criminal accusation leveled by the Jan. 6 committee was Section 371 of Title 18, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to conspire with another person to defraud the government. The panel cited an array of evidence about Mr. Trump’s interactions with various lawyers and aides in pursuit of his effort to prevent the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral victory. The committee also argued that prosecutors could prove Mr. Trump intended to be deceitful via evidence that he was repeatedly told that his allegations of widespread voter fraud were baseless.Potential charge: Conspiracy to make a false statementThe Jan. 6 committee highlighted the efforts to submit slates of fake electors to Congress and to the National Archives. As with other such potential charges, a key challenge for prosecutors would be proving Mr. Trump’s intentions and understanding beyond a reasonable doubt.Potential charge: InsurrectionThe committee also pointed to Section 2383 of Title 18, which makes it a crime to incite, assist or “aid and comfort” an insurrection against the authority and laws of the federal government. The panel emphasized in particular how Mr. Trump refused for hours to take steps to call off the rioters despite being implored by aides to do so, and an inflammatory tweet he sent about Mr. Pence in the midst of the violence.While the committee said the events of Jan. 6 met the standard for an insurrection, it is notable that prosecutors have not accused any of the Jan. 6 defendants to date of that offense — even those they charged with seditious conspiracy. More