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#AceBreakingNews – Manhattan District Attorney’s Donald Trump indictment?

The payoffs, and the way that Mr Trump’s company accounted for one of them, are believed to be at the centre of a grand jury investigation that led to a criminal indictment that could result in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former US president.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury after a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.

The specific charges are not yet known, as the indictment remains under seal.

Mr Trump is seeking the Republican presidential nomination to run again in 2024.

He said he was “completely innocent” and indicated he would not drop out of the race.

Mr Trump accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, of trying to hurt his chances of winning re-election.

“This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” he said in a statement.

Shortly after, Mr Trump appealed to supporters to provide money for a legal defence.

The charges will likely be unsealed by a judge in the coming days.

Mr Trump will have to travel to Manhattan for fingerprinting and other processing at that point.

Mr Bragg’s office said it had contacted Mr Trump’s attorney to coordinate a surrender, which a court official said would likely occur next Tuesday.

Mr Trump’s lawyers Susan Necheles and Joseph Tacopina said they will “vigorously fight” the charges.

Stormy Daniels

Stormy Daniels is a porn actor who has also had bit parts in mainstream films including, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Knocked Up.

Ms Daniels was paid $193,000 to keep quiet about what she says was an awkward and unexpected sexual encounter with Mr Trump at a celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe in 2006.

Mr Trump denies having sex with Ms Daniels.

Ms Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was paid the money in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign after her representative said she was willing to make on-the-record statements to the National Enquirer or on television confirming a sexual encounter with Mr Trump.

Her former lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is serving 11 years in prison for extortion and fraud, including a conviction for stealing $442,000 in proceeds from Ms Daniels’s 2018 book, Full Disclosure.

Karen McDougal

Karen McDougal is a former Playboy model who said she had a 10-month affair with Mr Trump in the mid-2000s.

Ms McDougal was paid $223,000 in 2016 by the parent company of the National Enquirer for the rights to her story about the alleged relationship.

Mr Trump denies any affair.

The story never ran. The company suppressed Ms McDougal’s story until after the election, a dubious journalism practice known as “catch and kill”.

American Media has acknowledged that its payments to Ms McDougal were done specifically to assist Mr Trump’s election bid and were made “in concert” with his campaign.

Ms McDougal has said Mr Trump tried to pay her after their first sexual tryst at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2006.

She said she continued the relationship with Mr Trump for about 10 months and broke it off in April 2007 because she felt guilty.

Michael Cohen

A lawyer by training, Michael Cohen worked for the Trump Organization from 2006 to 2017, serving as Mr Trump’s fixer. He once proudly proclaimed he’d “take a bullet” for his boss.

Cohen took the lead in arranging the payment to Stormy Daniels,passing it through a corporation he established for the purpose.

He says he was then reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the payment and related bonuses as “legal expenses.”

A few months earlier, Cohen had also arranged for the publisher of the National Enquirer to make a similar payment to Ms McDougal for the rights to her story about an alleged affair with Mr Trump.

Cohen made recordings of a conversation in which he and Mr Trump spoke about the arrangement to pay Karen McDougal through the tabloid publisher. Mr Trump denies the affair.

Federal prosecutors in 2018 charged Cohen with evading taxes related to his investments in the taxi industry, with lying to Congress and with campaign finance violations related to the hush money payments.

Cohen, who blamed Mr Trump for his legal problems, pleaded guilty and served about a year in prison before being released to home confinement because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He is now a key prosecution witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation.

Allen Weisselberg

The longtime chief financial officer at the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg made key decisions in how the company kept its books but did not appear to be cooperating with the hush-money investigation.

During testimony before Congress in 2019, Cohen said it was Weisselberg who decided how to structure his reimbursement for the payment to Ms Daniels. 

Cohen said Weisselberg paid the money out over 12 months “so that it would look like a retainer”.

Federal prosecutors gave Weisselberg limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his grand jury testimony in their investigation of the payments. 

But the Manhattan district attorney’s office ultimately brought unrelated charges against Weisselberg for dodging income taxes on job perkshe got from Mr Trump’s company, including a rent-free apartment and a luxury car.

He pleaded guilty and is serving a short jail term set to expire in April.

David Pecker

The National Enquirer’s former publisher and a longtime friend of Mr Trump, David Pecker testified twice before the grand jury about the tabloid’s involvement in suppressing negative stories about Mr Trump.

Mr Pecker met with Michael Cohen during Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign and said the Enquirer’s parent company would help buy and bury potentially damaging stories about Mr Trump’s relationship with women.

Mr Pecker, who was the Enquirer’s chairman and chief executive at the time, agreed to keep Cohen apprised of any such stories. 

In June 2016, he alerted Cohen that Karen McDougal’s lawyer had approached the publication seeking to sell her story about an alleged affair with Mr Trump.

The Enquirer’s owner at the time, American Media, then agreed to pay Ms McDougal for “limited life rights” to the story of her relationship with “any then-married man”. 

Cohen signed an agreement to buy the non-disclosure part of Ms McDougal’s contract for $186,000 through a company he formed, but Mr Pecker later called off the deal and told Cohen to tear up the agreement.

Federal prosecutors agreed in 2018 not to prosecute American Media in exchange for its cooperation in the campaign finance investigation that led to Cohen’s guilty plea and prison sentence.

The Federal Election Commission fined the company $279,000 deeming the McDougal deal as a “prohibited corporate in-kind contribution.”

Mr Pecker stepped down as CEO of the publisher in 2020.

Alvin Bragg

Manhattan’s first black district attorney, Alvin Bragg could become the first prosecutor anywhere to bring a criminal case against a former US president. 

The Democrat inherited an investigation of Mr Trump when he took office in January 2022.

Mr Bragg grew up in Harlem during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic, where he says he was held at gunpoint six times — three times by police. 

A graduate of Harvard Law School, he previously worked as a federal prosecutor, chief deputy state attorney general, civil rights lawyer and law school professor.

After taking office, Mr Bragg paused an investigation into Mr Trump’s business dealings that had been seen as gathering momentum toward a possible indictment. 

But after his prosecutors won a trial last year in which Mr Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was convicted of tax fraud, Mr Bragg convened a new grand jury to examine the hush money payouts.

Joseph Tacopina

Joseph Tacopina is the public face of Mr Trump’s defence team.

Mr Trump is just the latest big name to turn to Mr Tacopina, whose past clients have included the rappers Meek Mill, Jay-Z and A$AP Rockyand baseball great Alex Rodriguez.

In recent weeks, Mr Tacopina has been making the former president’s case on TV news shows, questioning Alvin Bragg’s investigation and motives, challenging Michael Cohen’s credibility as a star witness and suggesting Mr Trump was extorted.

It wasn’t always like that. 

In a TV appearance in 2018, long before Mr Tacopina started representing Mr Trump, he told CNN that the payment to Ms Daniels appeared to be “illegal” and a “potential campaign finance issue”. 

He told the network that claims Mr Trump wasn’t aware of the payment “doesn’t pass the straight-face test”.

Mr Trump hired Mr Tacopina in January, initially to defend him against a civil lawsuit brought by magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, who says Mr Trump raped her in the mid-1990s. That case is scheduled to go to trial next month.

Susan Necheles

FILE – Attorney Susan Necheles arrives to criminal court, Oct. 31, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)(AP: John Minchillo)none

Susan Necheles is a New York City defence lawyer who represented Mr Trump’s company at its tax fraud trial last year and has been working behind the scenes on the former president’s criminal defence, meeting with prosecutors in an attempt to head off potential charges.

In the past, she served as counsel to the late Genovese crime family underboss Venero Mangano, known as Benny Eggs, and defended John Gotti’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, in a contempt-of-court case in the early 1990s. 

Like Joseph Tacopina, Ms Necheles is a former Brooklyn prosecutor.

During the Trump Organization trial, she made a point of referring to Mr Trump as “President Trump”.

Matthew Colangelo

Prosecutors Matthew Colangelo, left, and Susan Hoffinger, right, leave a state office building , Thursday March 30, 2023, in New York. A lawyer for Donald Trump said Thursday he’s been told that the former president has been indicted in New York on charges involving payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to silence claims of an extramarital sexual encounter. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)(AP: Bebeto Matthews)none

Alvin Bragg hired Matthew Colangelo in December to lead the investigation.

They previously worked together on Trump-related matters as senior officials at the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James.

During his tenure with the attorney general’s office, Mr Colangelo worked on a lawsuit that resulted in the closure of Trump’s charitable foundation for misusing funds.

He was also part of a wave of state litigation against Trump administration policies, resulting in dozens of lawsuits that challenged everything from diluted environmental standards to changes to US mail service ahead of the 2020 election.

After President Joe Biden took office, Mr Colangelo joined the US Justice Department and was temporarily its third in command. He then became a principal deputy to Associate US Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

Previously, Mr Colangelo served as deputy assistant to president Barack Obama, was a deputy director of the National Economic Council and was a chief of staff for the US labor secretary.

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