The Storm Arrives: NYC Grand Jury Indicts Donald Trump
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A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Donald Trump on Thursday over his role in the scheme to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels and protect his successful 2016 presidential campaign—a historic event marking the first time a former American president faces serious criminal charges.
Trump will be arraigned in Manhattan criminal court next week, according to a lawyer for the former president—an unprecedented event that's sure to draw journalists and crowds from around the world.
The indictment, was filed under seal Thursday by a Manhattan grand jury, was confirmed by Trump attorney Joseph Tacopina. The details have not been released. It is not clear if Trump, who was still at Mar-a-Lago when word of the indictment emerged, will be placed in handcuffs. The Manhattan District Attorney's Office immediately issued a statement saying it is negotiating with his lawyers "to coordinate his surrender."
Before the grand jury action, Trump had called for his MAGA worshippers to protest. And law-enforcement, mindful of what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 after his exhortations, has been girding for crowds.
The indictment, first reported by The New York Times, stems from a three-minute escapade in the summer of 2006 that Daniels called “the definition of bad sex,” a last-minute hush money payment in 2016, and an alleged cover-up that plagued the first years of the Trump administration.
A combination photo of Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels and U.S. President Donald Trump
The law enforcement effort was delayed by years of political interference from Trump while he was in the White House, inaction from federal prosecutors who were in a better position to build a case sooner, and a hesitant Manhattan District Attorney who was unwilling to take on the case during his first year in office.
The criminal case pits Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Jr. against the biggest target his storied office has ever encountered: a hugely powerful business tycoon who secured the White House and overturned the nation’s politics, amassed a loyal following, and put together an even more formidable treasure chest from which to fund a legal defense.
Trump, who hurried to announce a re-election campaign to return to the White House in 2024 ahead of a flurry of expected criminal indictments in New York and elsewhere, has decried this investigation and others as a “political witch-hunt trying to take down the leading candidate.”
“I did absolutely nothing wrong, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I have wanted to have an affair with Stormy Daniels,” he posted on March 9 to Truth Social, his own online platform.
Like many Trump-related scandals, this one has played out like a slow-motion train wreck where the details got lost as an exhausted American public heard bits and pieces of the same story over years.
Former attorney Michael Avenatti goes on trial in New York
As Daniels would later detail in her tell-all book, Full Disclosure, it all started during a celebrity golf championship in Nevada on July 13, 2006. The porn star caught Trump’s attention, and the real estate mogul had his bodyguard invite her for dinner—only to direct her instead to his penthouse suite at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino. After a three-hour conversation with Trump, who was married at the time, Daniels described being caught by surprise when she emerged from a bathroom only to find him on the bed in his “white briefs, a white V-neck, and socks.”
“I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart. And then it was over. He came on me, not in me. I’d say the sex lasted two to three minutes. It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had,” she recalled in her book.
Daniels claims she was goaded into selling her story in 2011 to the celeb gossip magazine In Touch Weekly for $15,000, only to have the entire process suddenly come to a halt after what she understood to be a menacing, mob-like attempt to shut her up. In her book, she described how a man approached her in Las Vegas while she was pulling her newborn daughter out of the car to attend a MamaFit exercise class.
“Beautiful girl you got there. It’d really be a shame if something happened to her mom,” she recalled him saying. “Forget the story. Leave Mr. Trump alone.”
Attorney Michael Avenatti speaks to the media after the sentencing of Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump's former attorney, at the United States Court, in the Manhattan borough of New York City
The ordeal didn’t resurface until the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election, when the Trump Republican campaign was spiraling in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape leak that featured him gloating about mistreatment of women and how he would “grab ‘em by the pussy.” According to her book, that’s when Daniels prepared to go public on ABC’s Good Morning America—only to have Trump’s agents approach her with a 17-page, $130,000 nondisclosure agreement. She interrupted a video shoot she was directing in Malibu to walk to the bottom of a hill to sign the papers, which were in a car’s trunk.
“This was about putting all this behind me confidentiality and never having to worry about Trump coming after me or my family.”
Trump’s trusted lawyer and self-described “fixer,” Michael Cohen, tapped into his own home equity line to front the money. Ten days before the Nov. 2016 election, he used a shell corporation to wire the funds to a celebrity lawyer that was representing Daniels, leaving the adult filmmaker with an $80,000 cut.
But the details of that arrangement would end up being pivotal: Trump, then president, had his private company, the Trump Organization, compensate Cohen with 11 installments that totalled $420,000. The deal had shielded his political campaign from potentially catastrophic embarrassment, but the payments didn’t appear on campaign finance disclosures.
Enraged Fox News Host Warns After Trump Indictment: ‘People Better Be Careful’
It wasn’t until early 2018 that The Wall Street Journal exposed the hush money scheme, and within months, Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court to campaign finance violations. In court papers, Trump himself was famously referred to as “Individual-1,” a key figure in the criminal conspiracy. However, the Department of Justice during the Trump administration refused to investigate any further—and prosecutors who worked on that team have refused to speak a single word about their decision to not act.
Geoffrey Berman, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, eventually wrote a book explaining how Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr, put relentless political pressure on local federal prosecutors to keep them from threatening the White House.
In his own memoir, Disloyal, Cohen described how Trump was kept in the loop throughout the operation, which was coordinated with the company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who is now serving time behind bars at Rikers Island for tax fraud in an unrelated crime.
In recent weeks, Cohen has appeared several times to testify before the Manhattan grand jury that voted to indict Trump. Daniels, through her new lawyer, also offered to meet with prosecutors.
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