Manhattan prosecutors begin presenting Trump case to grand jury

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.