Trump could face indictment
Law enforcement officials in New York are making security preparations for the possibility that former US president Donald Trump could be indicted in the coming weeks and appear in a Manhattan courtroom in an investigation examining hush money paid to women who have alleged having sexual encounters with him, four law enforcement officials have said.
There has been no public announcement of any time frame for the grand jury’s secret work, including any potential vote on whether to indict the former president. The Manhattan district attorney’s office had no comment.
The grand jury has been hearing from witnesses, including former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who says he orchestrated payments in 2016 to two women to silence them about sexual encounters they said they had with Trump a decade earlier.
Trump denies that the encounters occurred, has said he did nothing wrong, and has cast the investigation as a ‘‘witch hunt’’ by a Democratic prosecutor bent on sabotaging the Republican’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Manhattan District Attorney
Alvin Bragg’s office has apparently been examining whether state laws were broken in connection with the payments or the way Trump’s company compensated Cohen for his work to keep the allegations quiet.
Porn actor Stormy Daniels and at least two former Trump aides – political adviser Kellyanne Conway and spokesperson Hope Hicks – are among the witnesses who have met with prosecutors in recent weeks.
Cohen has said that at Trump’s direction, he arranged payments totalling US$280,000 (NZ$447,000) to Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal during his first presidential campaign. Prosecutors say the payments amounted to impermissible, unrecorded gifts to Trump’s election effort. Meanwhile, it has emerged that Trump’s White House failed to report more than 100 gifts from foreign nations worth more than US$250,000 (NZ$400,000), and federal officials have been unable to find two of them, according to a report from House Democrats. Among the unreported items are 16 gifts from Saudi Arabia, including a dagger valued at as much as US$24,000 (NZ$38,000), and 17 presents from India that included expensive cufflinks, a vase and a model of the Taj Mahal, says the report from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
The report says federal officials have not been able to locate a life-size painting of Trump commissioned by the president of El Salvador as a gift just before the 2020 US election. Also unaccounted for are thousands of dollars’ worth of golf clubs given to Trump in 2018 and 2019 by Shinzo Abe, then the prime minister of Japan.