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      Every indictment will make Trump stronger – and Republicans wilder | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The indictment of Donald J Trump has not driven a wooden stake through his heart. He has risen, omnipresent and ominous again, overwhelming his rivals, their voices joined into his choir, like the singing January 6 prisoners, proclaiming the wickedness of his prosecution. As he enters the criminal courthouse to pose for his mugshot and to give his fingerprints, evangelicals venerate him as the adulterous King David or the martyred Christ.Trump does not have to raise his hand to signal to the House Republicans to echo his cry of “WITCH-HUNT”. He owns the House like he owns a hotel.“I keep him up on everything that we’re doing,” says Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who serves as one of his agents over the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Nine of the 25 Republicans on the House judiciary committee and 11 of the 26 on oversight have endorsed him. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, has pledged her allegiance. Jim Jordan, who refused to honor a subpoena from the January 6 committee, now issues flurries of subpoenas as chair of the Orwellian-named subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, to obstruct investigations of Trump, and not incidentally into Jordan’s and other House Republicans’ roles in the insurrection. But not even a subpoena to the New York district attorney, Alvin Bragg, or any other prosecutor, could command the tide of indictments.Between the motion of Trump’s first indictment and the act of the last Republican primary, more than a year from now, on 4 June 2024, the shadow will fall on the only party with an actual nomination contest. Trump’s pandemonium will only have an electoral valence for the foreseeable future in its precincts. His damage to the constitution, the national security of the United States and the rule of law will be extensive, but his most intense and focused political destruction will be circumscribed within the Republican party.From the report of every new indictment to its reality, Republican radicalization will accelerate. Every concrete count will confirm every conspiracy theory. Every prosecution and trial, staggered over months and into the election year, from New York to Georgia to Washington, will be a shock driving Republicans further to Trump. Every Republican candidate running for every office will be compelled to declare as a matter of faith that Trump is being unjustly persecuted or be themselves branded traitors.Profession of the holy creed of election denial has already been broadened to demand profession of the doctrine of Trump’s impunity. Every Republican attempting to run on law and order will be required to disavow law and order in every case in which Trump is the defendant. Trump’s incitement to violence will not have an exception of immunity for the Republican party. Beginning in the Iowa caucuses, the confrontations may not resemble New England town meetings. If Trump were to lose in the first tumultuous caucuses, can anyone doubt he will claim it was rigged? Was January 6 a preliminary for the Republican primaries of 2024?The death watch of Trump is a cyclical phenomenon. After each of his storms, the pundits, talking heads and party strategists on all sides emerge from their cellars, survey the latest wreckage and check the scientific measurements of the polls to give the “all clear” sign that the cyclone had passed. When Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, thoughtful analysts assured that Trump’s time was gone, he would fade away and his comeback in 2024 was an impossibility, just “not going to happen”. Everyone should “relax”. Then came January 6. When Trump’s endorsed candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, a gaggle of election deniers and conspiracy mongers, were ignominiously rejected, last rites were pronounced. Trump was dead again.“We want to make Trump a non-person,” Rupert Murdoch said after the January 6 insurrection. Trump’s image was virtually banished from his bandbox of Fox News. He would be airbrushed out of the next episode of history.“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” wrote Emily Seidel, chief executive of the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, in a memo.On 5 February, the Koch dark money syndicate held a conference of its billionaire donors and key activists at Palm Springs, California, to lay the groundwork for the dawning of the post-Trump age. There it was decided to swing its enormous resources behind the candidacy of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who they had originally cultivated as one of their Tea Party hothouse congressmen.The wishful thinking that Trump would magically disappear, however, ignored the omens of Liz Cheney’s purging, the victories of his candidates in the midterm Republican primaries over blanched “normies”, and the corrupt bargain that McCarthy was forced to make to secure his speakership. The implacability of Trump’s political base’s attachment was discounted.Murdoch, Koch et al should have grasped the dangerous fluidity of the extremism they stoked, financed and organized for decades, which metastasized into Trump. Their approach to Trump was not dissimilar to that of Vladimir Putin, treating him as their useful idiot. Putin’s purpose was and is to use Trump to destroy Nato and the western alliance, and as an agent of chaos within the US of a magnitude that no KGB agent could have recruited during the cold war.The Koch network contentedly used Trump to pack the courts with Federalist Society stamped judges, deregulate business and thwart policy on climate change. But despite delivering those goods, Trump was ultimately uncontrollable. The problem with Trump was not his wildness and lawlessness. They were willing to tolerate him so long as his administration produced for them. Trump’s foibles were the cost of business. His liability was that he was not their kind of Republican, at heart a laissez-faire free market libertarian. Trump hated international trade and opposed slashing entitlements, particularly social security and Medicare, which they have long tried to hobble and privatize. In 2018, he tweeted his contempt for the “Globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles … I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them rich.” But his worst debit for them was that he lost. With DeSantis, they thought they could finally move on. Without Trump, they could wipe the slate clean, restore the past and return to the glory days when the Tea Party militants besieged town hall meetings to shriek against Obamacare. The undercurrent of the oligarchs’ romance with DeSantis is a strange nostalgia.Trump’s announcement on 18 March that he would be arrested and charged in New York three days later, born of a combination of panic and seizing an opportunity for grift, was not a deliberate strategic masterstroke, though it had that effect. In February, DeSantis led Trump by 45% to 41% in the Yahoo/YouGov poll. In the poll taken just after Trump said he would be arrested, Trump shot into the lead 47% to 39%. After he was indicted, he left DeSantis in the dust, 57% to 31%.Trump had already sent Murdoch’s and Koch’s presumptive candidate reeling. DeSantis has positioned himself as a cultural warrior but Trump smashed into his vulnerable flank. Before he adopted his gay bashing and race- and Jew-baiting persona, DeSantis was a cookie-cutter Tea Party congressman who voted several times to cut social security and Medicare. When Trump slammed him for his votes in early March as “a wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy”, DeSantis renounced his position, saying he would not “mess” with social security. Even before the indictment, Trump had Il Duce of the Sunshine State dancing like Ginger Rogers backwards in the Cuban heels of his cowboy boots. Trump has not relented. The day after he was indicted, his Make America Great Again political action committee broadcast an ad ripping DeSantis: “President Trump is on the side of the American people when it comes to social security and Medicare. Ron DeSantis sides with DC establishment insiders … The more you see about DeSantis, the more you see he doesn’t share our values. He’s not ready to be president.” On the right that Trump has made, national socialism beats laissez-faire.DeSantis reacted to Trump’s indictment by stating that he would not extradite him from Florida to New York, which nobody had asked him to do. His empty gesture as a two-bit secessionist would be in defiance of the constitution’s article IV extradition clause. Between the emotion and the response falls the hollow man. His rhetorical lawlessness in tribute to Trump only enhanced Trump’s pre-eminence over him.If anyone should have known better, it was Murdoch. His media properties now veer from slavishly outraged defense of the accused Trump on Fox News (“Witch-hunt!”) to trashing him in the New York Post (“Bat Hit Crazy!”) to puffing DeSantis in the Times of London, not widely read in Iowa or New Hampshire. The ruthless operator has been outplayed. Murdoch, who takes no prisoners, is Trump’s prisoner.Murdoch profitably buckled in for the Trump ride all the way to January 6. His decision not to jump off for the crash has now landed him in his biggest scandal, thrusting him in the middle of the Trump debacle with a January 6 trial of his own. After the 2020 election, following the lead of Trump and his attorneys, Fox News broadcast that Dominion Voting Systems had changed or deleted votes to help steal the election. The Fox chief executive, Suzanne Scott, wrote in an email shutting down the fact-checking of Trump falsehoods: “This has to stop now … this is bad business … the audience is furious and we are just feeding them material.” On 5 January, the eve of the attack on the Capitol, Murdoch discussed with Scott whether the network should report the truth: “The election is over and Joe Biden won.” He said those words “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen”. Scott told him that “privately they are all there” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers”. On 12 January, Murdoch emailed the Fox board member Paul Ryan that he had heard that the Fox host Sean Hannity “has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers”.Fox was terrified of its own audience, the Trump base it had whipped up day after day, fearful it would defect to a more pro-Trump site, Newsmax or One America News Network. Instead of broadcasting the facts, its executives ordered conspiracy theories and lies be aired to satisfy voracious demand. Murdoch admitted in an email that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were “really crazy stuff”. But the show must go on. Dominion is now suing Fox News for $1.6bn for defamation.Much of the material in the discovery documents reads like dialogue from a bad French farce.“I hate him passionately,” wrote a histrionic Tucker Carlson about Trump. Murdoch told Scott about Giuliani’s and the others’ lies: “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.” On 21 January 2021, Murdoch called Trump “increasingly mad”. Murdoch wondered, after serving as Trump’s chief enabler, “The real danger is what he might do as president.” Quel surprise!Of course, the specific falsehoods Fox recklessly and maliciously broadcast about Dominion were of a piece with those the network has been pumping out for years. That Murdoch is shocked, shocked is worthy of Capt Renault discovering there is gambling in the backroom of Rick’s Café in Casablanca. “Your winnings, sir.”The day after Trump was indicted, Judge Eric Davis ruled that the Dominion case would go to trial.“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it is] CRYSTAL clear that none of the [Fox News] statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” he wrote. That trial will begin in mid-April and will probably last for weeks with major Fox personalities and Murdoch called to the stand. The very bad news is that in Delaware, where the trial will take place, unlike in New York, where the Trump trial will be held, television cameras are allowed in the courtroom. Undoubtedly, Fox will not be airing the humiliation of its stars and executives, but it is certain that CNN, desperate for ratings, and MSNBC will happily fill schedules with a Fox cavalcade.Fox’s propaganda was intimately linked to the January 6 coup, but could not be investigated by the January 6 committee. Murdoch’s desperate desire to separate himself from Trump will be impossible when Fox’s lies for Trump in the subversion of constitutional democracy are on full display. The Dominion trial will provide a necessary complement to the trials of Trump, more than an atmospheric touch of political theater, but bearing on politics moving forward. Murdoch, chained to his service to Trump, will not escape a judgment any more than Trump.The response of Fox’s audience to Fox in the dock will inevitably be to rally around Trump. Murdoch may be finished with Trump but Trump is not finished with him. Murdoch’s trial will contribute to the tightening of support for his object of contempt.“I am your retribution,” Trump promises. He rages against DeSantis and Fox as “Rinos” – Republicans In Name Only, which is to say Republicans. In the courtroom drama ahead, Trump will flail against his host of prosecutors, but his retribution during his battle for the nomination will be levied against the Republican party.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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      The indictment of Donald Trump – podcast

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      Donald Trump will make history this week as the first US president to be charged with a criminal offence. Later today he will present himself at a court in Manhattan to hear the charges against him which relate to campaign finance irregularities over the hush money paid to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final days of his successful 2016 run for office. As Hugo Lowell tells Michael Safi, once again with Trump we are in uncharted territory. Trump denies breaking the law and has targeted the prosecutor of the case with claims of a “witch-hunt”. He’s also using the court appearance as a focal point for recent fundraising efforts. The case is unlikely to be resolved before the 2024 election in which Trump is still the leading candidate in the Republican nomination race. But in all likelihood he will be campaigning for the White House while facing felony charges next year. More

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      Trump lawyer hopes Tuesday’s court hearing will stay ‘painless and classy’

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      An attorney for Donald Trump has said he hopes the proceedings can stay “painless and classy” at the court hearing scheduled for Tuesday where the former president plans to plead not guilty to charges filed against him after an investigation into hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.Joe Tacopina told CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday that many of the particulars of the arraignment set for Tuesday were still “very much up in the air” besides the fact that the ex-president would “very loud and proudly say not guilty”.For instance, though he has said he doesn’t expect his client to be handcuffed, he claimed to not even know whether Trump would take the standard criminal defendant mugshot while being fingerprinted at the courthouse. Many people facing charges have found getting a mugshot taken to be humiliating, but some observers believe Trump could seek to put it on merchandise meant to raise funds as he runs for the oval office again in 2024.“Hopefully, this will be as painless and classy as possible for a situation like this,” Tacopina told the show’s host, Dana Bash. “I don’t even know, really, what brings us here.”Tacopina then spent some of the rest of his time with Bash arguing that the payments to Daniels that preceded Trump’s indictment were personal, as he’s done before. He insisted that they were part of a legal settlement, had nothing to do with the 2016 presidential campaign that he won and therefore documentation of them was not filed with the federal election commission.“This was a personal expenditure, not a campaign expenditure,” Tacopina said. “Had it been a campaign expenditure, he would have used campaign funds, and then of course we’d be talking about … the outrage at Donald Trump [using] campaign funds for personal spending. They’d be baying for his scalp. … He’s damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.”It remained unclear Sunday even to Trump’s legal team exactly what he had been charged with – the state indictment that a Manhattan grand jury handed up against him three days earlier was still under a court seal. However, it appears he may face dozens of charges over his role in the payment of $130,000 to Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 that the ex-president denies.The deal to pay Daniels to stay quiet materialized during the presidential race that Trump won over Hillary Clinton as the actor negotiated a deal to go on television and discuss her claims of the purported sexual encounter. Trump’s then lawyer, Michael Cohen, made the payment before pleading guilty in 2018 to federal charges of tax evasion and campaign-finance violations.The federal case that ensnared Cohen – who has since forfeited his license to practice law in New York – did not produce any charges against Trump. It was a separate state grand jury empaneled earlier this year by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg which voted to indict Trump after investigating whether the way in which he repaid Cohen – in $35,000 monthly increments documented as legal expenses – complied with laws governing campaign finances and the keeping of business records.At least one of the charges filed against Trump is a felony, reported the Associated Press, citing people familiar with the matter, which ostensibly increases the risk of prison time the former president might face if he is eventually convicted.Tacopina on Sunday dismissed Cohen as “a pathological, convicted liar”. He also alluded to how Cohen had gone on CNN hours after Trump became the first former US president to be indicted criminally and said he actually didn’t believe he had done anything wrong when he pleaded guilty in 2018.“I have all the documents to show – there was no tax evasion,” Cohen said. “None of this is accurate.”Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, spoke on the air with Bash after Tacopina and said there was “substantial documentation” beyond his client’s word of Trump’s role in the Daniels hush money as well as a similar payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. McDougal has maintained that she had an affair with Trump in 2006 as well, when he was already married to former first lady Melania Trump. Trump denies McDougal’s claims, too.“There are other documents from other people and other testimony from other people – some of it direct [and] involved in conversations with Mr Trump,” Davis said. “It’s a wrong strategy if he thinks he’s building his whole strategy on personal attacks on Michael Cohen.”Preparations for Trump’s arraignment at Manhattan’s state criminal courthouse at 100 Centre Street have been ongoing for more than a week. Barriers have been put in place to help authorities with crowd control.If Trump enters his plea as planned on Tuesday, he is scheduled to be doing so in a courtroom where defendants accused of murder, attempted terrorism and illegal gun possession are set to appear as well.Reuters reported that the former president intended to spend the night at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Monday night. Trump sent out a statement on Sunday saying he then planned to make remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday evening after the scheduled arraignment. More

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      American Ramble review: a riveting tale of the divided United States

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      In spring 2021, Neil King trekked 330 miles from his Washington DC home to New York City. He passed through countryside, highways, towns and churchyards. His 25-day walk was also a journey through time. He looked at the US as it was and is and how it wishes to be seen. His resultant book is a beautifully written travelog, memoir, chronicle and history text. His prose is mellifluous, yet measured.In his college days, King drove a New York cab. At the Wall Street Journal, his remit included politics, terror and foreign affairs. He did a stint as global economics editor. One might expect him to be jaded. Fortunately, he is not. American Ramble helps make the past come alive.In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, King stops at the home of James Buchanan, the bachelor president from 1857 to 1861, who sympathized with the south and loathed abolition. Ending slavery could wait. Of the supreme court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, Buchanan highly approved.Also in Lancaster, King visits a townhouse once owned by Thaddeus Stevens, the 19th-century Republican congressman and radical abolitionist. At the start of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, viewed the conflict as the vehicle for preserving the Union. He opposed slavery but opposed secession more. For Stevens, slavery was an evil that demanded eradication.Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, King describes how the ancestors of one town greeted Confederate troops as heroes while another just 20 miles away viewed them as a scourge. Forks in the road are everywhere.King pays homage to the underground railroad, describing how the Mason-Dixon Line, the demarcation between north and south, free state and slave, came into being. Astronomy and borders had a lot to do with it. All of this emerges from the scenery and places King passes on his way.Imagining George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, he delivers a lesson on how such rivers came to be named. Names affixed to bodies of water by Indigenous peoples gave way to Dutch pronunciation, then anglicization. The Delaware, however, derived its moniker from Lord De La Warr, a “dubious aristocrat” otherwise known as Thomas West.Yet joy and wonder suffuse King’s tale. He smiles on the maker’s handiwork, uneven as it is. American Ramble depicts a stirring sunset and nightfall through the roof-window of a Quaker meeting house. Quiet stands at the heart of the experience. The here and now is loud and messy, but King ably conveys the silent majesty of the moment. The Bible recounts the Deity’s meeting with the prophet Elijah. He was not in the wind, a fire or an earthquake. Rather, He resided in a whisper.King recalls an earlier time in a Buddhist monastery. Warned that surrounding scenery would detract from solitude and commitment, he nevertheless succumbed. King is nothing if not curious.The quotidian counts too. He pops cold beers, downs pizzas and snarfs chicken parmesan. A wanderer needs sustenance. He is grateful for the day following the night. Predictability is miraculous, at times invaluable.King is a cancer survivor and a pilgrim. He is a husband and father, son and brother. Life’s fragility and randomness have left their mark. His malady is in remission but he moves like a man unknowing how long good fortune will last. His voice is a croak, a casualty of Lyme disease. He is restless. Life’s clock runs. He writes of how his brother Kevin lost his battle with a brain tumor.King puts his head and heart on the page. His life story helps drive the narrative, a mixture of the personal, political and pastoral. But it is not only about him. He meets strangers who become friends, of a sort. At times, people treat him as an oddity – or simply an unwanted presence. More frequently, they are open if not welcoming. As his walk continues, word gets out. Minor celebrity results.The author is awed by generosity, depravation and the world. He is moved by a homeless woman and her daughter. Traversing the New Jersey Turnpike presents a near-insurmountable challenge. A mother and son offer him a kayak to paddle beneath the traffic. He accepts.A Colorado native, King is at home in the outdoors. Nature is wondrous and sometimes disturbing. Rough waters complicate his passages. He studies heaps on a landfill. He meets a New Jerseyan with pickup truck adorned by Maga flags. The gentleman bestows beer, snacks and jokes. King divides the universe into “anywheres” and “somewheres”. He puts himself in the first camp and finds placed-ness all around.American Ramble captures the religious and demographic topography that marks the mid-Atlantic and north-eastern US. Here, dissenters, Anabaptists, German pietists, Presbyterians and Catholics first landed. King pays homage to their pieces of turf. His reductionism is gentle. He appreciates the legacy of what came before him. Landscapes change, human nature less so, even as it remains unpredictable.“When I crossed the Delaware two days before,” he writes, “I had entered what I later came to call Presbyteriana, a genteel and horsey patch settled by Presbyterians and Quakers.” Princeton University stands at its heart.E pluribus unum was tough to pull off when the settlers came. It may even be tougher now. King quotes Nick Rizzo, a denizen of Staten Island, New York City’s Trumpy outer borough: “We are losing our ability to forge any unity at all from these United States.”Rizzo joined King along the way. In the Canterbury Tales, April stands as the height of spring. It was prime time for religious pilgrimages, “what with Chaucer and all, and it being April”, Rizzo explains.“Strangers rose to the occasion to provide invaluable moments,” King writes. Amen.
      American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      A 2006 encounter and cash for silence: how the Trump-Stormy Daniels case unfolded

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      The Stormy Daniels affair, which this week made Donald Trump the first US president ever to be criminally indicted, first reached the White House in February 2017.“So picture this scene,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, said in congressional testimony two years later. “One month into his presidency, I’m visiting President Trump in the Oval Office for the first time.“It’s truly awe-inspiring, he’s showing me around and pointing to different paintings, and he says something to the effect of … ‘Don’t worry, Michael, your January and February reimbursement cheques are coming. They were FedExed from New York and it takes a while for that to get through the White House system.’”“As he promised, I received the first cheque for the reimbursement of $70,000 not long thereafter.”But what Cohen has described as “a biblical-level sex scandal” involving those cheques, which reimbursed a hush money payment to a porn star, had actually begun years before and has finally come to a head years later with Trump running for the White House again.How did it all happen?Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is a star in the world of adult film. In 2006, when she was 27, she attended a celebrity golf event in Utah, where she met Donald Trump. Then 60, he was a New York real estate billionaire and a reality TV star, via the NBC show The Apprentice.According to Daniels’ memoir, Full Disclosure, she spanked Trump with a copy of Forbes magazine featuring him on the cover. He said she reminded him of his daughter, Ivanka, and floated a slot on The Apprentice. Trump also reassured Daniels that he and his wife, Melania, who has just given birth to a son, slept in separate beds.“Oh fuck,” Daniels thought. “Here we go.”They had sex.According to Daniels, the two met again – once repairing to a Beverly Hills hotel room to discuss Trump’s fear of sharks. But they never had sex again.In 2011, Trump flirted with running for president and Daniels tried to sell her story, but Cohen threatened to sue, quashing a magazine interview. A gossip website picked up the thread but no one pulled it.In 2015, Trump did run for president. In 2016, as he dominated the Republican primary, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, sold her own Trump affair story to the National Enquirer. It was a “catch and kill” deal, worked out by Cohen and David Pecker, the chairman of American Media. The story never ran.In October 2016, a month before election day against Hillary Clinton, Trump’s campaign was upended by the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about groping women. As more women accused Trump of misconduct, an agent for Daniels contacted the Enquirer.Cohen worked out a deal: Daniels would get $130,000 in return for silence. In a CBS interview in 2018, Daniels said she accepted the deal because she was afraid for her family, including her young daughter.Cohen worked out the deal with Trump and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization chief financial officer now imprisoned for tax fraud. Cohen paid $130,000 but was reimbursed $420,000 in payments recorded as “legal expenses”, including a bonus and $50,000 for a payment to a firm that produced rigged polls.In congressional testimony, Cohen said: “Mr Trump directed me to use my own personal funds from a home equity line of credit to avoid any money being traced back to him that could negatively impact his campaign. I did that.”In April 2018, the Wall Street Journal broke the Daniels story. Cohen claimed it never happened. Trump also lied, saying he was unaware of the deal. A month later, he admitted paying Cohen “a monthly retainer not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign”, concerning “a private contract between two parties known as a nondisclosure agreement”.Trump denies having sex with Daniels.But Trump also disappointed Cohen, failing to give him a White House role. And as the federal investigation of links between Trump and Russia continued, Cohen landed in an uncomfortable spotlight. In April 2018, FBI agents raided his office in New York.“Am I El Chapo all of a sudden?” Cohen would write later of the moment.He wasn’t a Mexican drug lord but he was a prize eagerly sought by the law: the man who knew where the bodies were buried in Trump’s world. Cohen flipped.In August 2018, he pleaded guilty on eight federal counts including tax evasion and campaign finance violations linked to the Daniels payments. In December 2018, he was sentenced to three years in prison. The same month, Daniels was ordered to pay Trump $300,000 over a dismissed defamation suit filed by her then (now disgraced) attorney, Michael Avenatti.But the story continued. In February 2019, in testimony to the House oversight committee, Cohen described the Daniels affair and much more.In New York, investigations of Trump’s financial affairs continued. One Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, bequeathed an investigation to another, Alvin Bragg. Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud and was jailed. No Trump indictment emerged.Mark Pomerantz, an experienced prosecutor working for Bragg, resigned and criticised the DA for not moving against Trump, who Pomerantz said was guilty of “numerous” felonies. This February, Pomerantz released a book in which he described the Daniels payment as a “zombie case”, because it would not die.Shortly after that, it emerged that Bragg was moving towards an indictment arising from the Daniels payment, reportedly involving falsification of business records, tax fraud and campaign finance violations.On Thursday, news broke of an indictment, reportedly on 34 counts, covering the cheques Trump sent to Cohen.Trump denounced the charge, complaining of political persecution.Cohen told CNN: “It’s a lot of counts, no matter how you want to slice it. Thirty-four is a lot of counts.”Daniels said: “Thank you to everyone for your support and love! I have so many messages coming in that I can’t respond … also don’t want to spill my champagne.” More

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      Trump will not be put in handcuffs for court date, lawyer says

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      Donald Trump’s lawyer insists the former president will not be put in handcuffs after a New York grand jury voted on Thursday to indict him over hush money payments made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.Speaking on ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday, a lawyer representing Trump, Joe Tacopina, said the indictment was shocking to Trump and his team.“I feel like the rule of law died yesterday in this country, and it’s not something I’m happy about,” Tacopina said. “This is unprecedented in this country’s history. I don’t know what to expect other than an arraignment.”Tacopina outlined what could happen: the courthouse will close as Trump arrives, Trump will appear in front of a judge and plead not guilty. His team will file motions against the indictment, arguing against “the legal liability of this case”.“I’m sure they’ll try to get every ounce of publicity from this thing,” Tacopina said. Referring to Trump and prosecutors, he added: “The president will not be put in handcuffs. I’m sure they’ll try to make sure they get some joy out of this by parading him.”Secret Service and New York state and city police are not “going to allow this to become a circus, at least as much as humanly possible”, Tacopina predicted. According to a memo seen by NBC, New York police have been told to report for duty on Friday and be prepared for “unusual disorder”.Since the indictment was still under seal on Friday morning, it was unclear how many charges Trump faces for the payment made to Daniels, for which he reimbursed his then lawyer Michael Cohen, who ended up going to prison for crimes partly related to the case, and has turned on his former boss and testified for the prosecution to the grand jury.Reports say Trump is facing at least 30 counts of business fraud. This is the first time a former US president has ever been criminally indicted.Though it is unclear whether Trump will be handcuffed, he is expected to be fingerprinted and photographed. More

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      Who is Alvin Bragg, the DA who got a grand jury to indict Donald Trump?

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      Alvin Bragg’s official biography describes him as a “son of Harlem” who became Manhattan district attorney after “a lifetime of hard work, courage and demanding justice”.In obtaining a grand jury indictment against Donald Trump over his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels in 2016, the Democrat has now carved himself a place in history, as the man behind the first vote to criminally indict a former president.Now 49, Bragg is a Harvard-educated former assistant New York state attorney general and assistant US attorney in the southern district of New York.In 2021, he was elected as the first Black Manhattan DA and only the fourth permanent occupant of the post in 80 years.In office, his biography says, he has focused on “protecting everyday New Yorkers from abuses by the powerful, and correcting past injustices by vacating wrongful convictions”.The biography also highlights the creation of a Special Victims Division, handling “extremely sensitive cases in a trauma informed and survivor centered manner”, and an expansion of a Hate Crimes Unit.Bragg has prominent critics, however. Chief among them is Mark Pomerantz, an experienced New York prosecutor who joined an investigation of Trump begun by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr, but resigned in February 2022.In his resignation letter, Pomerantz said Trump was “guilty of numerous felony violations” in his business and political affairs and called Bragg’s initial decision to stop pursuing an indictment “a grave failure of justice”. The two men exchanged shots in the press.Last month, Pomerantz published a book in which he described efforts to make Trump’s hush money payment to Stormy Daniels a viable path to prosecution.Pomerantz called the Daniels payment a “zombie case” because it would not die. A month later, it emerged that Bragg was homing in on a Trump indictment in the very same case.Bragg’s official biography now highlights a six-count indictment against the Trump ally Steve Bannon for fraud, and the conviction of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization chief financial officer, for tax evasion.Bragg has also faced criticism for his approach to crime, not least from the New York City police commissioner, Keechant Sewell.In early 2022, Bragg issued a memo instructing prosecutors to avoid seeking prison time for all but the most serious crimes. In a city where crime is always a key political issue, and in an atmosphere of heightened concern fueled by the disruptions of the Covid pandemic, Sewell told NYPD officers she was “severely troubled”.Bragg said the memo had been misunderstood. After a meeting, he and Sewell agreed that “police and prosecutors would weigh the individual facts and circumstances of each case with a view toward justice and work together to keep New Yorkers safe”.Later in 2022, the issue of crime and punishment in New York flared forth again. After a Hispanic Harlem shopkeeper stabbed a Black assailant, Bragg charged the shopkeeper with second-degree murder. After an outcry, the charges were dropped. More

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      Donald Trump indicted on criminal charges in hush money payment case – live

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      Donald Trump and his legal team were reportedly not given advance warning that an indictment was coming down.But they have now been informed of the decision, the Associated Press has confirmed.We have not heard yet from the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, whose office is in charge of that case.A lawyer for Trump said moments ago that the former president has now been told that he’s been indicted. It has not been made public what the charges are or whether such charges will be of misdemeanor or felony status. The grand jury will have filed the indictment under seal.Observers believe this has taken the president’s team, at least in the moment, by surprise, where they are gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida.Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the indictment of Donald Trump, the former president and current presidential candidate, on criminal charges related to his hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.Numerous US media outlets are reporting that the grand jury in New York has voted in the last few minutes to indict Trump.It is a historic move. No former president has ever been criminally indicted. We are waiting for details to emerge and for reactions from Trump or his legal team.Daniels says she had a short sexual affair with Trump in 2006. Trump denies that.Trump also denies wrongdoing, despite admitting reimbursing the $130,000 payment made by his then lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, as election day approached in late 2016.Trump claims to have been a victim of extortion, and says, via lawyers, he initially lied, saying he knew nothing of the payment, because it involved a non-disclosure agreement.News of the Daniels payment broke in early 2018, when Trump was president. Cohen later pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, contributing to a three-year custodial sentence.Trump faces wide-ranging legal jeopardy, also including investigations of his election subversion at federal and state levels, a civil suit over his business affairs in New York and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation by the writer E Jean Carroll.He denies all wrongdoing. In the Manhattan hush money case, as in the investigation of his election subversion in Georgia, where an indictment is thought to be imminent, Trump claims to be the victim of prosecutorial racism.According to Mark Pomerantz, a New York prosecutor who worked under Bragg, as the Manhattan DA continued an investigation begun by his predecessor, the Daniels payment came to be seen as a “zombie case” that simply would not die.It has now risen to bite Trump, potentially roiling the race for the Republican nomination to face Joe Biden at the polls next year.Stay with us for rolling coverage. More