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      Trump’s indictment will probably hurt him with the electorate. But how much? | Lloyd Green

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      On Thursday, Manhattan prosecutors indicted Donald Trump. The charges against him stem from $130,000 in hush-money paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels.The question now looms whether the nation will face Trump-incited violence as a result. The former president threatened “death and destruction” if charged. In a now infamous social media post targeting the Black district attorney Alvin Bragg, Trump depicted himself brandishing a baseball bat at the District Attorney, and called him as an “animal” and “degenerate psychopath”.Some critics have characterized the indictment as an aggregation of record-keeping infractions, the “zombie case” that Bragg initially declined to bring. In his book People vs Donald Trump, Mark Pomerantz, a onetime lawyer in Bragg’s office, previously argued that this particular set of charges was legally wanting.Regardless, the latest fireworks will likely damage Trump with the broader electorate even as Joe Biden struggles with a banking crisis and persistent inflation. “Trump won’t change, and that shows he can’t win,” intones the Murdoch-controlled New York Post. Still, don’t bet that Fox News changes its tune.Faced with a court order, a passel of senior Trump advisors and administration officials may soon be witnesses, including Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff.The drumbeat continues. Next month, Trump stands trial for defamation and sexual assault. He faces a civil suit brought in New York by E Jean Carroll. Unlike his purported relationship with Daniels, this case centers on rape and degradation.Carroll contends that a quarter of a century ago Trump attacked her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store. He parried that she was not his “type”. But at a recent deposition, he mistook her for Marla Maples, his second wife, raising questions about his credibility and mental acuity.The Trump-Carroll square-off will also provide the country with another opportunity to revisit history. Her lawyers will probably play the infamous Access Hollywood tape. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump said on a hot mic. “You can do anything.”Separately, a New York judge has refused to delay a $250m civil fraud action commenced by the state against Trump, his three older children and the Trump Organization, the family business. The October 2023 trial date is “written in stone”, Judge Arthur Engoron said last week.More than two decades have lapsed since a Republican-controlled House of Representatives impeached Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair.Lindsey Graham, then a congressman, acted as a manager at Clinton’s impeachment trial. These days, the South Carolina senator prattles about dire consequences for Democrats, anything to golf with Trump.Senator Rand Paul, the self-styled libertarian, calls for Bragg’s arrest. Marjorie Taylor Greene demands that George Soros, foreign-born and a Bragg-backer, be stripped of his US citizenship.Meanwhile, McCarthy, the speaker of the House, ordered Republicans to “immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions”. Faced with a letter from congressional Republicans demanding documents and testimony, Bragg refused to yield.Their missive “only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested,” the District Attorney shot back. Such circumstances, he wrote, did not represent “a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry”. Jim Jordan and the rest of the crew refused to take “no” for an answer. On Saturday night, Bragg told them to pound sand.Congressional Republicans now mull legislation to immunize past and current presidents from “politically motivated prosecution”. Conveniently, the Republican party has forgotten those chants of “lock her up”. The law-and-order party meddles with a live criminal investigation.The ex-reality show host closed the week with a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, site of the fatal 1993 Branch Davidian standoff. The fiery siege left more than 80 cult members and four law enforcement officials dead.Personal grievance pocked Trump’s remarks. The investigations surrounding him were “something straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show,” he declared. Trump tore into Bragg for “prosecutorial misconduct.”After the rally, Trump reportedly suggested that Bragg had dropped the Daniels case. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 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

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      Donald Trump indicted over 2016 hush money payment – report

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      Donald Trump has been indicted in New York, over a hush money payment made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election, the New York Times reported on Thursday.The paper cited four people with knowledge of the matter.No former US president has ever been criminally indicted. The news is set to shake the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, in which Trump leads most polls.Trump also faces legal jeopardy over his election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress; his attempts to overturn the 2020 result in Georgia; his retention of classified records; his business dealings; and a defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape by the writer E Jean Carroll, which Trump denies.Daniels claims an affair with Trump in 2006. Trump denies the affair but has admitted directing his then lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay Daniels $130,000 for her silence.Cohen was also revealed to have arranged for $150,000 to be paid to Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who claimed to have an affair with Trump.That payment was made by David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid newspaper, which squashed the story.Trump has admitted reimbursing Cohen with payments the Trump Organization logged as legal expenses.Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 and was president from 2017 to 2021. News of the payment to Daniels broke in January 2018.Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law, contributing to a three-year prison sentence handed down in December 2018.Investigations of the Daniels payment have dragged on. Earlier this year, Mark Pomerantz, an experienced New York prosecutor who resigned from Bragg’s team then wrote a book, called the payment a “zombie case” which would not die.Earlier this month, Cohen testified before the grand jury in the Manhattan hush money case. Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway, former White House aides, reportedly spoke to prosecutors, as did Daniels, Pecker and Jeffrey McConney, senior vice-president and controller of the Trump Organization.Trump did not testify. He denies wrongdoing, claiming the payments represented extortion.Earlier this week, a Trump lawyer, Joe Tacopina, told MSNBC Trump had simply taken advice from his lawyer, Cohen, which was “not a crime”. Tacopina also said the payments to Cohen were simply “legal fees”.Trump’s lawyers are expected to seek to delay the case.Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor in New York, said Trump would in all likelihood not head swiftly to court.Writing for MSNBC, Weissmann said: “Beyond Trump’s notorious abuse of the legal system by throwing sand in the gears to slow things down, a criminal case takes time.”He added: “There is no end of motions that can be filed to delay a trial, which could easily cause the litigation to be ongoing during the Republican primary season [in 2024] – something a court could also find is reason to delay any trial date.“Indeed, even in a more quotidian case, having a trial within a year of indictment would be quick.” More

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      Trump’s verbal assaults pose risks to prosecutors and could fuel violence

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      Donald Trump’s demagogic attacks on prosecutors investigating criminal charges against him are aimed at riling up his base and could spark violence, but show no signs of letting up as a potential indictment in at least one case looms, say legal experts.At campaign rallies, speeches and on social media Trump has lambasted state and federal prosecutors as “thugs” and claimed that two of them – who are Black – are “racist”, language designed to inflame racial tension.He has also used antisemitic tropes by referring to a conspiracy of “globalists” and the influence of billionaire Jewish financier George Soros.Trump’s drive to undercut four criminal inquiries that he faces is reaching a fever pitch as a Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry looks poised to bring charges against Trump over his key part in a $130,000 hush money payment in 2016 to adult film star Stormy Daniels with whom he allegedly had an affair.In his blitz to deter and obfuscate two of the criminal investigations, Trump has resorted to verbal assaults on two Black district attorneys in Manhattan and Georgia labeling them as “racist”, even as he simultaneously battles to win the White House again.In a broader attack on the four state and federal investigations at a Texas rally on Saturday Trump blasted the “thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system”, while on his Truth Social platform last week he warned of “possible death and destruction” if he’s charged in the hush money inquiry.But now Trump’s incendiary attacks against the federal and state inquiries is prompting warnings that Trump’s unrelenting attacks on prosecutors could fuel violence, as he did on January 6 with bogus claims that the 2020 was stolen from him and a mob of his backers attacked the Capitol leading to at least five deaths.“Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, amplified through his social media postings and his high decibel fearmongering in Texas, pose clear physical dangers to prosecutors and investigators,” said former acting chief of the fraud section at the justice department Paul Pelletier. “With Trump’s actions promoting the January 6 insurrection serving as a cautionary tale, the potential for violent reactions to any of his charges cannot be understated.”Ex-prosecutors see Trump reverting to tactics he’s often deployed in legal and political battles.Trump’s invective say experts won’t deter prosecutors as they separately weigh fraud, obstruction and other charges related to January 6 and other issues, but echo scare tactics he’s used before as in his two impeachments, and may help Trump’s chances of becoming the Republican nominee by angering the base which could influence primary outcomes.“None of these accusations about the motives of prosecutors, however, will negate the evidence of Trump’s own crimes. A jury will focus on the facts and the law, and not any of this name calling. The Trump strategy may work in the court of public opinion, but not in a court of law,” said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan.That may explain why Trump has received more political cover from three conservative House committee chairs, who joined his effort to intimidate Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, by launching investigations to obtain his records and testimony, threats that Bragg and legal experts have denounced as political stunts and improper.The legal stakes for Trump are enormous, and unprecedented for a former president, as the criminal inquiries have been gaining momentum with more key witnesses who have past or present ties to Trump testifying before grand juries, and others getting subpoenas.Two investigations led by special counsel Jack Smith are separately looking into possible charges against Trump for obstructing an official proceeding and defrauding the US government as he schemed with top allies to block Joe Biden from taking office, and potential obstruction and other charges tied to Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left office.Further, Fulton county Georgia district attorney, Fani Willis, has said decisions are “imminent” about potentially charging Trump and others who tried to overturn Joe Biden’s win there in 2020 with erroneous claims of fraud.Much of the probe’s work has involved a special grand jury that reportedly has recommended several indictments, with a focus on Trump’s high pressure call on 2 January 2021 to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger beseeching him to just “find” 11,780 votes to help block Joe Biden’s win there.Trump has denied all wrong doing and denounced the inquiries as “witch hunts”.Little wonder though that Trump’s squadron of lawyers has lately filed a batch of motions in Georgia and Washington DC with mixed success to slow prosecutors as they have moved forward in gathering evidence from key witnesses and mull charges against Trump.“Blustering in court or in the media about the supposed bias or racism of the Fulton county and Manhattan county prosecutors will not convince a court to remove a democratically-elected prosecutor, and certainly the Republicans in the House of Representatives have no legal authority ability to influence the course of criminal justice in New York state proceedings,” said Fordham law professor and ex-prosecutor in New York’s southern district Bruce Green.Green stressed: “None of Trump’s moves, such as calling prosecutors racists, are likely to throw any of the prosecutors off their game: prosecutors tend to be focused, determined and thick-skinned.”Likewise, ex-US attorney in Georgia Michael Moore told the Guardian the Trump attacks on the two black prosecutors are “completely baseless. The charges of racism against the prosecutors is more of an indication of the weakness of his claims than most anything else he has said.”Moore scoffed too at the moves by Trump’s House Republican allies.“It’s rich to me that the Republicans in the House claim to be the party of limited government, but as soon as they get in power and look like they might lose another election, they immediately use their big government power to meddle in a matter that purely belongs to the local jurisdiction.”NYU law professor Stephen Gillers sees similar dynamics at play in Trump’s tactics.“Trump cannot stop the judicial process, although he can try to slow it. But he can undermine its credibility through his charges and by mobilizing his supporters. I see what he’s doing now as aimed at them, just as he tried to discredit the election returns in their eyes and anger them with baseless charges over the “steal”.The weakness of Trump’s legal moves was revealed in two court rulings in DC requiring testimony before grand juries from former top aides including ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the January 6 inquiry, and one of his current lawyers Evan Corcoran in the classified documents case.The two rulings should give a good boost to the special counsel in his separate investigations of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss on January 6 when Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s win about which Meadows must now testify, and Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar a Lago after he left the White House about which Corcoran has to testify.As the four investigations intensify, more aggressive moves by Trump and his lawyers to derail potential charges in Georgia, Manhattan and from the special counsel are expected before, as well as after, any charges may be filed.“If I were on the prosecution teams in Manhattan or Georgia, I would expect Trump to assert every defense he can think of, including accusing the prosecutors of misconduct,” McQuade said.A judge on Monday ordered Fani Willis to respond by 1 May to the Trump team’s motion seeking to bar her from further investigating or charging Trump, and wants all testimony from some 75 witnesses, including Meadows and Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, before the special grand jury rejected.The judge’s order was in response to a Trump legal motion that McQuade said “appears to be baseless”.Former Watergate prosecutor Phlip Lacovara told the Guardian that Trump’s lawyers are deploying different legal tactics in the investigations.“The Georgia strategy is partly a strategy of delay,” in which the Trump team is “raising dozens and dozens of objections, many of which are specious, in the hope that one will be sufficient to work on appeal and to keep him out of jail,” Lacovara said.In Manhattan, he added, they’re trying “to create the impression that this is a highly visible political stunt to exclude Trump from running”.That tactic could help in “trying to pollute the jury pool” since a hung jury would be good for Trump. “All he needs is one juror who believes this is all a concocted plot.”Former DoJ officials and experts expect Trump and his lawyers will keep up a frenzied stream of hyperbolic attacks and legal actions.“This is more of what we saw during the election,” said former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer who served in the George HW Bush administration. “He throws up gibberish and obstruction.” More

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      Trump lawyer says ex-president based remarks about arrest last week on ‘rumors’

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      Donald Trump’s lawyer has admitted that the former president based his incendiary and unfounded remarks about his imminent arrest last week on mere speculation prompted by “rumours”.Trump ignited a week of political, media and law enforcement frenzy when he announced on his social media platform Truth Social that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday in the New York criminal investigation relating to hush money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. Security was stepped up at the Manhattan courthouse and around the district attorney leading the case, Alvin Bragg, amid fears of renewed protests by Trump supporters, some of whom staged the deadly attack at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Now Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, has admitted that his client ignited the firestorm based on nothing more than conjecture. Speaking on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, he denied that Trump had invented the claim that he was facing imminent arrest only to reveal the flimsy basis of the remarks.“He didn’t make it up, he was reacting to a lot of leaks coming out of the district attorney’s office,” Tacopina said. “And then there was of course a lot of rumours regarding the arraignment being the next day. So I think he just assumed, based on those leaks, that was what was going to happen.”The Daniels hush money case appears to be the most advanced of the multiple legal threats currently bearing down on Trump. While no charges were brought last week, the grand jury could reconvene Monday with an arraignment possible as early as the end of the day.Trump has placed the Manhattan case at the front and centre of his 2024 presidential bid. He has been furiously fundraising on the back of what he has called the “witch-hunt” against him, bombarding his supporters with a blitzkrieg of begging emails.On Saturday night he devoted much of the first big rally of his 2024 campaign to raging against “prosecutorial misconduct by radical left maniacs”. The event was located – some say strategically – in Waco, Texas, scene of the 1993 siege between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians cult in which 76 people died.In his Meet the Press interview, Tacopina declined either to defend or condemn Trump’s rhetoric, insisting he was a lawyer – not a “social media consultant”. The lawyer denounced the Manhattan prosecution as being politically motivated and said that his client was being unfairly hounded for having made a personal payment to protect his family from Daniels’ false claims of an affair.“This was a personal civil settlement that’s done every day in New York City,” Tacopina said. “This had nothing to do with campaign finance.”The $130,000 payment to Daniels came in the dying days of the 2016 presidential election as the adult film star was about to go public with allegations of a sexual encounter with Trump which he has denied. Michael Cohen, Trump’s then fixer who made the initial payment, pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws involving the hush money as well as other tax fraud charges, and served time in prison.Cohen said he had made the payment at Trump’s direction.Trump has stoked fears of renewed violence by deriding Bragg on social media in virulent and racist terms, calling the Black prosecutor a “Soros-backed animal” – a reference to the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros – and accusing him of doing the work of “anarchists and the devil”.Trump has also predicted “potential death and destruction” were he to be charged. That inflammatory statement prompted Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, to warn that “if he keeps it up it’s going to get someone killed”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate intelligence committee, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that he had been briefed by the FBI that the agency was prepared for any protests. He called Trump’s rhetoric “outrageous”, accusing the former president of having “very little moral compass”.The senator added: “If he spurs on additional violence, it would be one further stain on his already checkered reputation.”Senior Democrats have expressed some jitters that the Manhattan investigation is perhaps the hardest legal case to bring against Trump given the challenges of successfully prosecuting alleged campaign finance breaches. Warner added his voice to those concerns, saying: “Whichever of these prosecutions move forward, I hope whoever moves forward has a rock solid case.”Leading Republicans have rallied around Trump, echoing his claim that the Manhattan case is an example of a politicized and “weaponized” prosecutorial system. Last week, three top House Republicans sent a letter to Bragg demanding that he provide information about his own criminal investigation of Trump – a move that the prosecutor denounced as unlawful interference in a state legal proceeding.One of the signatories of the letter, James Comer, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that Bragg had opened “a can of worms”, warning it could spark retaliation by Republican prosecutors around the country. “You are going to have county attorneys in red areas, in parts of rural Kentucky where I am, who are going to try to overreach into federal election crime,” he said.As Manhattan remains on tenterhooks, the former president is facing more legal peril on other fronts. Last week, a federal appeals court ordered Trump’s main lawyer Evan Corcoran to appear before the grand jury that is hearing evidence about the unauthorized retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida home, intensifying the risk of Trump facing obstruction of justice charges.In a separate ruling last week, another federal judge denied executive privilege to several former Trump officials, including the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. As a result the former aides, who had a ringside seat to Trump’s increasingly aggressive behaviour in the buildup to the January 6 attack, must testify before the grand jury investigating the Capitol insurrection.
      This article was amended on 26 March 2023 to clarify the relationship between Donald Trump and Joseph Tacopina. More

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      Trump says he’s not upset over possible indictment while attacking ‘fake’ case

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      Donald Trump repeatedly insisted on Saturday night he was not upset by expected criminal charges that might arise from the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into his role in paying hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels as he returned from a campaign rally in Waco, Texas.But the manner of Trump’s responses to questions suggested worries about potential damage to his image, and he came across as someone angry that his good vibrations with his “Make American great again” base in Texas could be interrupted by the reality of a possible indictment as soon as this week.Travelling back from his first rally as a 2024 presidential candidate, Trump claimed during a recorded interview with four reporters aboard his Trump Force One plane that he was unafraid about the investigation even as he attacked the case and attacked media reporting about the case.“I’m not frustrated by it. It’s a fake investigation. We did nothing wrong – I told you that,” the former president said before proceeding to lash out at the NBC News reporter on the plane who asked if he was frustrated. “This is fake news, and NBC is one of the worst. Don’t ask me any more questions.”Trump also acknowledged during the interview that he had no actual insight into the investigation. He said “I have no idea what’s going to happen” – before deciding that he supposedly knew what would happen anyway and claiming, “They’ve already dropped the case, from what I understand.”Trump then settled on attacking the investigation, insisting the case is over while making various assertions not supported by concrete evidence and mainly based on speculation that has circulated among his allies and the campaign.“If anything ever happened with the case, it’s a fake case. This is a fake case. They have absolutely nothing. They have it in reverse. They should indict Michael Cohen for all the lies that he told,” Trump said, referring to the attorney who made the hush money payment to Daniels. “They may not do that, but that’s what should be happening.”The case centers on $130,000 that Trump paid to Daniels through Cohen in the final days of the 2016 campaign. Trump later reimbursed Cohen with $35,000 checks using his personal funds, which were recorded as legal expenses. Cohen later pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal crimes.It remains unclear what charges the district attorney Alvin Bragg might seek against Trump, though some members of his legal team believe the most likely scenario involves a base charge of falsifying business records coupled with potential tax fraud because Trump would not have paid taxes on the payments.The remarks from Trump on the flight came during an interview with four reporters. The Guardian obtained the recording after this reporter, confirmed to travel with the former president, was bumped off the manifest the day before the trip over recent reporting that the campaign disliked.The former president also said during the interview that the previous week had buoyed him, at least from a 2024 campaign perspective, correctly noting how he has surged in recent polls amid news of an expected indictment and the Republican base’s clamoring to his defense.“We’ve had the best polls we’ve ever had,” Trump said. Using a derisive nickname for Florida governor and expected 2024 candidate Ron DeSantis, Trump added: “Ron DeSanctimonious is crashing. They’re already looking for somebody to take his place.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You know where he would be right now [if he wasn’t the governor]? Probably working either at a cigar store or a law firm.”Trump’s rhetoric about the hush money investigation has turned increasingly bitter in recent days as he has gone from lashing out at the prospect of criminal charges, to insisting he wanted to be handcuffed and arrested, back to once again attacking the matter with vehemence.The former president’s attacks on Bragg took a turn on Friday when he predicted in an overnight post on his Truth Social website that “death and destruction” could come should the grand jury in New York return an indictment against him.Returning from the Texas rally on Saturday, where he used his speech to repeatedly air grievances about the investigation, Trump sought to distance himself from his darkest comments that had come as Bragg’s office discovered a threatening letter and white powder in its mailroom.“No – I don’t like violence and I’m not for violence,” Trump said.Then, repeating his lie that electoral fraudsters stole victory from him over Joe Biden in 2020, he said: “But a lot of people are upset and you know they rigged the election, they stole an election, they spied on my campaign. They did many bad things.” More