PROSECUTORS BEGIN PRESENTING CASE
Grand jury receives evidence on Trump role in hush money
The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday began presenting evidence 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 the 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 yet 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 that might shed light on the episode.
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 lowlevel 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 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 as he mounts a 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 on
Trump’s business practices, including whether he fraudulently inf lated the value of his assets to secure favorable loans and other 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.
One of them, Mark Pomerantz, was highly critical of Bragg’s decision and has written a book that is scheduled to be published next week, “People vs. Donald Trump,” detailing his account of the inquiry. Bragg’s office recently wrote to
Pomerantz’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, expressing concern that the book might disclose grand jury information or interfere with the investigation.
Although he balked at charging Trump over the asset valuations, this is a different case and Bragg is now a bolder prosecutor. He has ramped up the hush money inquiry in the weeks since his prosecutors convicted Trump’s company in an unrelated tax case, a far cry from his unsteady early days in office, when Bragg was under fire from all quarters for unveiling a host of policies designed to put fewer people behind bars.
For his part, Trump has denied all wrongdoing and chalked up the scrutiny to a partisan witch hunt against him. He has also denied having an affair with Daniels. If Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.
“This is just the latest act by the Manhattan DA in their never-ending, politically motivated witch hunt,” the Trump Organization said in a statement, adding that reviving the case under what it called a “dubious legal theory” was “simply reprehensible and vindictive.”
A spokesperson for Bragg’s office declined to comment. Pecker’s lawyer, Elkan Abramowitz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for McConney and Tarasoff declined to comment.
The panel hearing evidence is likely what’s known as a special grand jury. Like regular grand juries, it is made up of 23 Manhattan residents chosen at random. But its members are sworn in to serve for six months to hear complex cases, rather than for 30 days, as is the case with panels that review evidence and vote on whether to bring charges in more routine matters.
The investigation, which has unfolded in fits and starts for more than four years, began with an examination of the hush money deal before expanding to include Trump’s property valuations.
Last summer, Bragg’s prosecutors returned to the hush money anew, seeking to jump-start the inquiry after the departures of Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, the other senior prosecutor in the investigation.
The district attorney’s office, working with the New York attorney general, Letitia James, is also continuing to scrutinize the way that the former president valued his assets, the people with knowledge of the matter said.