NEW YORK (AP) – Former US president Donald Trump is set to be released on Tuesday after his indictment in New York City, court officials said Friday. Trump’s planned surrender will signal the unprecedented arrest and indictment of a former US commander.
Trump’s indictment, announced Thursday, came after a grand jury probed money paid during the 2016 presidential campaign to quash allegations of extramarital sex. The indictment itself remains under seal, as was standard in New York before a settlement.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has denounced the investigation as a “scam,” “persecution,” wrongdoing and a political low blow aimed at damaging his presidential run in 2024. He is a Republican; the district attorney who oversaw the investigation, Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat.
No former president has ever been charged with a crime before, so there is no rulebook for booking one. Trump has Secret Service protection, so agents would have to be by his side at all times.
Indeed, Trump was asked to surrender on Friday, but his lawyers said the Secret Service needed more time to make security preparations, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
Even for defendants who turn themselves in, answering criminal charges in New York usually involves at least several hours of detention while they are fingerprinted, photographed and go through other procedures.
Bragg’s office said Thursday that it had contacted Trump’s lawyer to coordinate the surrender. Before the court announced the date of the disagreement, Trump’s attorney, Joseph Tacopina, said Tuesday was the likely date Trump could change himself.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg leaves the District Attorney’s office in New York, March 30, 2023. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
The investigation concerned six-figure payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Both claim to have had sexual relations with married Trump years before he entered politics; He denies having sexual relations with either woman.
As Trump ran for president in 2016, his allies paid the women to bury their allegations. The publisher of the mass market tabloid the National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to his story and sat on it, in a settlement announced by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen.
After Cohen himself paid Daniels $130,000, Trump’s company reimbursed him, added bonuses and logged the payments to Cohen as legal expenses.
Federal prosecutors – in a 2018 criminal case against Cohen – argued that the payments amounted to illegal aid to the Trump campaign. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violation charges, but federal prosecutors did not go after Trump, who was then in the White House. However, some of their court filings obligingly implicated him as having knowledge of the payment arrangements.
The indictment in New York came as Trump contends with other investigations that could have serious legal ramifications.
In Atlanta, prosecutors are considering whether he committed any crimes while trying to get Georgia officials to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
At the federal level, a special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice is investigating Trump’s efforts to fix national election results. In addition, the special counsel is examining how and why Trump kept a cache of top-secret government documents at his Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago, and whether the former president or his representatives tried to block the inspection in those documents. .
