Trump case goes to NYC grand jury
Testimony opens on hush money paid to adult film performer
NEW YORK — The Manhattan district attorney’s office began presenting evidence Monday to a grand jury about Donald Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The grand jury was recently impaneled, and the beginning of witness testimony represents a clear signal that the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is nearing a decision about whether to charge Trump.
On Monday, one of the witnesses was seen with his lawyer entering the building in lower Manhattan, New York, where the grand jury is sitting. The witness, David Pecker, is the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels.
As prosecutors prepare to reconstruct events surrounding the payment for grand jurors, they have sought to interview several witnesses, including the tabloid’s former editor, Dylan Howard, and two employees at Trump’s company, the people said. Howard and the Trump Organization employees, Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarasoff, have not testified before the grand jury.
The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents.
A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would
also rely on the testimony of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.
Still, the developments compound Trump’s legal woes in the early days of his third presidential campaign. A district attorney in Georgia could seek to indict him for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, and he faces a special counsel investigation into his removal of sensitive documents from the White House as well as his actions during the attack on the
Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Bragg’s decision to impanel a grand jury focused on the hush money — supercharging the longest-running criminal investigation into Trump — represents a dramatic escalation in an inquiry that once appeared to have reached a dead end.
Under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury about a case focused not just on the hush money but on Trump’s broader business practices, including whether he fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate to secure favorable loans and other financial benefits. Yet in the early weeks of his tenure last year, Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case and decided to abandon the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.
For his part, Trump has denied all wrongdoing and chalked up the scrutiny — as he has many times before — to a partisan witch hunt against him. If he were ultimately convicted, Trump would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.
A spokesperson for Bragg’s office declined to comment. A lawyer for Trump, Ronald Fischetti, declined to comment, as did a lawyer for McConney and Tarasoff.
Over the course of the lengthy inquiry into Trump and the conduct of his business, the hush money inquiry resurfaced within the district attorney’s office with such regularity in recent years that prosecutors came to refer to it as the “zombie theory” — an idea that just won’t die.
The first sign of progress for Bragg came this month when Cohen appeared at the district attorney’s office in lower Manhattan to meet with prosecutors for the first time in more than a year. Now, he is expected to return for at least one additional interview with the prosecutors in February, one of the people said.
Trump’s company was instrumental in the deal, court records from Cohen’s federal case show.
Although McConney and Tarasoff were not central players, they helped arrange for the Trump Organization to reimburse Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
Allen Weisselberg, the company’s former chief financial officer, was also involved in reimbursing Cohen. And, according to Cohen, Weisselberg was involved in a discussion with Trump about whether to pay Daniels.
Weisselberg is serving time in the Rikers Island jail complex after pleading guilty to a tax fraud scheme unrelated to the hush money deal, a case that also led to the conviction of the Trump Organization in December.