On Thursday evening, the grand jury of the Manhattan court in New York voted to indict Donald Trump: he is the first former American president to be subjected to a criminal trial in US history. The exact charges Trump has been indicted on have not yet been made public, but the case the Manhattan prosecutor is investigating concerns an alleged $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, which Trump allegedly made in 2016 via her firm and her former lawyer Michael Cohen to buy the actress silence about a sexual relationship she had with him a decade earlier.
The grand jury is a body present in the American legal system which is made up of twenty-three citizens drawn by lot, and which in some cases is called upon to decide whether the evidence collected by the prosecutor’s office is sufficient to initiate a criminal trial. According to the American media, the decision of the grand jury (which can be taken with a simple majority vote) came as a surprise: most analysts did not expect that a decision would be made within weeks.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is coordinating the investigation, said he has contacted Trump’s attorney to negotiate his handover to authorities, which is expected to take place in the next few days: one of his attorneys said it could happen on Tuesday . Trump, who is currently at his residence in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, will have to go to New York and appear in the Manhattan court. There he will be formally indicted and the charges read to him. He will have to leave fingerprints and take mug shots, among other things. He will then be released after formal indictment: in the state of New York, indicted people can also be released without bail, unless they are accused of a violent crime or in other special cases.
In a statement made public after the news, Trump said that “this is political persecution and electoral interference at the highest level in history”. Trump is a candidate in the Republican Party primaries for the 2024 presidential elections.
The case involving the alleged payment to actress Stormy Daniels is quite complicated and there are still some steps that are not entirely clear. According to the version of Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Gregory, she and Trump had a meeting and a sexual relationship in 2006, when he was 60 and she was 27: Trump promised her that he would make her participate in his reality show show The Apprentice. However, Trump has always denied every meeting.
For years, Daniels allegedly tried to sell the story of the sexual encounter with Donald Trump to several newspapers, and when Trump ran for president of the United States in 2016, according to the indictment, he assigned his lawyer Michael Cohen to settle the matter. Through a publisher friend (David Pecker of the National Enquirer gossip magazine, to whom Daniels had tried to sell the story), Cohen got in touch with Daniels’ lawyer, Keith Davidson, and the two struck a deal: Trump would pay $130,000 dollars to Daniels for his silence about their sexual relationship (Cohen admitted there was a payment). In the agreement, the two were referred to by two pseudonyms and the real identities of the contracting parties were revealed in a separate letter.
Cohen allegedly paid the $130,000 out of his own pocket, and then the Trump Organization, Trump’s main company, to hide the real reason for the payment reimbursed him by registering a fee for an invented legal advice.
This, in itself, would be a minor crime. For this reason it is not entirely clear why the prosecutor Alvin Bragg has decided to pursue a criminal indictment: part of the investigation is secret and the allegations will be made public only after they have been notified to Donald Trump, at the time of the formal indictment.
The hypothesis that circulates the most is that the prosecution will try to argue that Trump has violated the law that regulates funding for electoral campaigns: for example, arguing that the payment of 130,000 dollars constituted an illegal contribution to his electoral campaign, because thanks to that Trump payment silenced Daniels at a time when his revelations could have been very damaging to his campaign. The indictment is not yet known, but unless Bragg has evidence that the public doesn’t know about, some experts have already argued that the case may not be rock solid.
– Read also: The case of Trump and Stormy Daniels, explained
Violating the campaign finance law is a crime that can lead to up to four years in prison, but if convicted, the judge can also decide to impose non-prison sentences.
Another important element of this affair will be Trump’s reaction. Talk of the possible indictment had already begun in mid-March, when the former president had written on his social network Truth that he would be arrested within a few days. In his Truth post, Trump urged his supporters to protest the impending shutdown and “take back the country.”
In reality there was no arrest (and there won’t be even now that the indictment has arrived) and the demonstrators who showed up in New York to support the former president were just a handful. It was later understood that Trump had written that post in advance, without really having a clue what the Manhattan prosecutor’s office would do. Now it cannot be excluded that Trump will make new appeals to his supporters, or that in any case he will try to organize some kind of reaction from the Republican Party. Several party members have already expressed their solidarity with Trump.
Manhattan’s is not the only ongoing investigation against Trump, even if it is the only one so far that has resulted in a formal indictment.
A special counsel appointed by the Justice Department is investigating Trump for the case of the management of secret documents found at his residence in Mar-a-Lago. Trump is then subjected to a civil proceeding again in New York for having exaggerated the amount of his assets in order to defraud his creditors and his insurers. Finally, a criminal investigation is underway in Georgia into whether Trump committed crimes in trying to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, when Georgia was one of the swing states and was eventually attributed to Joe Biden.
